The ground rules for sweet pea growers
Pay attention to your soil – and it’ll soon be time to start sowing
It’s time to prepare for next year’s sweet pea display and paying attention to your soil now will reap rewards next year. Although sweet pea roots are nitrogen fixers, it’s best to remove the old haulms and roots because leaving them to rot down won’t help good soil hygiene if you plan to grow sweet peas in the same ground next year.
One of the best ways to keep beds healthy is to sneak in a green manure crop over winter, then dig it in two weeks before planting out your sweet peas. Mustard or Hungarian rye grass are good quick crops, although they do need a mild autumn to germinate well. We also use phacelia, which is pretty and attracts late insects. You can sow these green manures in vegetable or annual beds, too.
Because autumns have been so mild recently, we delay sowing next year’s sweet pea crop until the end of October. In an unheated greenhouse, the seeds go into deep root trainers or extra deep pots to give the roots plenty of room to expand over winter.
If you plan to keep autumn-sown sweet peas outside all winter, choose a porch or protected corner to provide shelter. To stop mice eating the seeds we use a clear lid, which is lifted on warm days to prevent the seeds rotting. The compost is just moist.
Trial successes
Out in Easton Walled Garden, we’ve now completed the sweet pea seed harvest. The seed was removed from the plants when fully ripe but before the pods twisted and threw the round, fat seeds all over the beds. The harvest is transferred to paper bags and the tearoom staff are busy on cold days (when we’ve less visitors), podding and preparing the seed for storage.
Back in early July, 3,000 visitors enjoyed the scent and colour emanating from three big beds in the gardens. We enjoyed chatting to them and some of the trial sweet peas (new to us this year) were very popular. We focused on white or cream varieties:
● Lathyrus odoratus ‘Clotted Cream’ was a favourite: floriferous with a popular name that describes the colour well.
● ‘Aphrodite’ was a great choice for the garden with long racemes of up to 10 white flowers but we found it frustrating for flower arranging because the bottom flower died before the top three had emerged.
● ‘Border Beauty’ was the out-and-out winner, with white blooms outlined with a faint mauve line. The effect throws
each flower into sharp focus. ● ‘Tracey Ann’ was an excellent white that went on flowering well after the others had finished. We’re going to retrial it to see if this was just chance or a characteristic of this pretty sweet pea. ● ‘Wedding Day’ also performed well and will join next year’s planting plan. All the sweet peas mentioned in the article are available from www.visiteaston.co.uk.