Keep sweet peas looking good
Keep on top of weeding and watering to keep them looking good
All our sweet peas are now in the business of producing beautiful blooms. The plants themselves may continue to grow taller for another fortnight. Ideally, if we could put in a request to the weatherman we’d order up light prolonged rain by night and strong sunshine by day to bring out the scent of every bloom. In reality, we’ll need to keep the seep hoses turned on during a dry spell and our fingers crossed during really wet weather.
If you live in a part of the country that’s habitually wet, we’ve found that the petals of sweet peas ‘Harlow Carr’ (pink/peach), ‘Red Arrow’, ‘Prima Donna’ (pale pink) and ‘White Frills’ (white) have excellent resistance to rain damage.
Weeding is important now as sweet peas like their own space. We don’t use a hoe, as it’s too easy to nick the narrow stems. Hopefully the tops of your plants are now self-supporting, but look out for tendrils reaching out to join neighbouring plants or supports. If they’re allowed to get away they can get very tangled up. Gently return them home and tie in with twine.
Every year about this time, I get enquiries from visitors who have seen badly formed, small, yellow buds on their young plants that drop off without flowering. Not surprisingly, this is known as bud drop. It’s nothing to be concerned about and as the season progresses, the plants will grow out of this and produce normal racemes.
We garden on a light, well-drained soil so feeding our sweet peas is essential. If you garden on clay or fertile soil you may not need to feed at all but be guided by the state of your sweet peas. If you spot a fungal infection (brown streaks on the stems or white mildew on the leaves) take action and spray immediately with a fungicide. You may not be able to prevent the disease from taking hold but you can extend the period that you can still pick flowers.
Good combinations of sweet peas:
l ‘Albutt Blue’ and ‘Watermelon’ are a beautiful combination of blue and peachypink sweet peas. The flowers and growth habit are a similar size and strongly scented. l For old-fashioned sweet peas with great scent you can’t beat a group of ‘Almost Black’,
‘King Edward VII’, ‘Flora Norton’ and ‘Miss Willmott’.
For containers, ‘America’ is an excellent choice as the plant is fairly short. The white flowers are heavily striped with red, have a strong scent and provide plenty of wow factor.
Preparing the gardens for sweet pea week
Our sweet pea week starts at the beginning of July. Ten days before, we’ll pick every raceme with open flowers to ensure there’s a fresh crop to coincide with our opening.
But it’s not just the sweet peas that need care. The cut flowers and veg are also annuals and need deadheading or harvesting to prevent them running up to seed. There are 200 roses to keep tidy and the meadows need another check for pernicious weeds. If all goes well, the garden reaches the height of its power over the next fortnight. In sunny weather, up to 14 species of butterfly flit over the flowers.