Gardening
Summer-scented sweet peas are so easy to grow and maintain, says our expert Karen Murphy
There are only a few superstar plants in the garden, ones that most people love and even the less green-fingered of us can recognise immediately, such as roses, daffodils or snowdrops. But right up there with them are sweet peas, ideal for making plump, colourful posies. They’re superstars in more ways than one – apart from being glorious frilly additions to a summer garden, growing up makeshift plant supports and giving off just the most heavenly fragrance, they’re easy to grow, just as their pea cousins are. Many people seem put off by a lot of preparation work, pest problems or the laborious overwintering of autumn-sown ones, but stick to sowing them now and keep your labour to a minimum. Plus, they actually don’t involve too much preparation. For instance, there’s no need to chip the seed coat or soak the majority of sweet pea seeds. Sow seed individually now in toilet roll inserts or root trainers – special trays with extra-long cells for good root growth – filled with seed compost. Keep them relatively warm, at about 15°C and, once germinated, keep them cooler in the greenhouse. They’re best started off in trays, as sown straight in the ground they can rot off or be pinched by mice! Spring-sown sweet peas don’t even need their tops pinching out, as it can lead to too much bushy sideways growth when you want them to grow up and out. Plant out in a month or so into enriched, moist soil and somewhere they may get a little shade. Our British climate is just perfect for them – they like it moderately warm and temperate, with a good deluge of rain and not too much glaring sun. If you feed them (though you don’t have to if your soil is rich and moist enough) use a tomato feed, which will head straight for the flowers instead of the leaves to boost them. Plant around supports of rough tree prunings to give them a bit of climbing purchase, and deadhead just-going-over blooms really often so they’ll produce a load more. There are hundreds of varieties to choose from – lots of specialist nursery sites offer fabulous varieties. Go for a range of colours, but if you’re gardening this year for pollinators, be aware that bees prefer blues and yellows.