How to grow sweet peas? Sweet peas are one of the easiest flowers to grow in your garden, whether from seeds or plug plants bought from your local garden centre.
Sweetpeas are a climbing plant, originally from Sicily. Simple to grow, they come in a variety of different colours and scents. From bright pinks and purples, to the more subtle dusky pinks and even some with beautifully mottled patterns adorning the petals.
Image Credit – Sarah Raven
Their heavenly scents can fill your garden with the most beautiful summer vibes. However, once cut and placed into vases around your home, will give you the best smelling home on the block!
How To Grow Sweet Peas
Sweet peas can be grown outside in the UK from around April time and will generally last throughout the summer months – especially if you regularly pick the flowers. The more you pick the flowers, the more flowers they’ll produce, and the longer they’ll last looking stunning in your garden.
Check The Label On Plug Plants
If you plan to grow your sweetpeas from seeds, look out for varieties that say ‘highly scented’ on the packaging. Most will be scented, but going for the highly scented ones will make sure you get the best scents wafting around your garden.
No Need To Soak Before Planting
You’ll probably hear advice saying you NEED to soak your sweet pea seeds before planting them. This actually isn’t true! We don’t do this and always get great flowering and healthy plants. However, we did try it one year – it made no difference in the end result.
In fact, soaking the seeds before planting them can do more harm than good. Soaking your seeds can actually deprive them of the necessary oxygen they need, causing them to rot before they germinate.
Starting Seeds In Pots
Many people will also say you need to start your seeds in the ground as they don’t like to be moved once established. Again, this isn’t true. We always start our seeds in individual seed trays in the greenhouse or on a sunny windowsill, then move them to their final growing place once it gets warm enough. Gardening expert Monty Don also starts his sweetpeas off in pots.
Fill deep pots (around 12cm deep) 3/4 of the way up with a combination of good quality potting soil and compost, lightly compact with your fingers and give it a good watering. Then place up to 4 seeds per pot, pressing the seed lightly into the soil for a good contact, before covering up with more of your soil/compost mix.
When you can see the roots emerging from the bottom of your pots, or the plants are around 2 inches tall, it’s time to plant them out. Depending on how you want to plant them, you can either separate into individual plants, or plant them out as they are in the groups of 4. Leaving them in their groups will mean less disturbance of their roots, and you’ll also get a much more dense flower display.
If you have a smaller garden, or perhaps a balcony garden, you can leave the sweet peas in pots. Just make sure you transplant them into bigger pots once ready (above) to give their roots plenty of growing space.
Give Them Room To Climb
As sweet peas are climbing plants, they will need something to climb up. Depending on the variety, you will need at least 4ft of growing room – they get tall!
There are many ways you can do this…
- Growing over archways
- Creating a sweet pea teepee
- Growing up a trellis
- Create a frame out of bamboo canes
- Grow them up netting
Feeding Your Sweet Peas
Sweet peas are very hungry plants. If you want yours to look anything like the below image, they must be kept well fed. You’ve already planted them into a soil/compost mix that will give them a good start. However, you must keep the soil rich in nutrients throughout the growing season.
You can top up their soil with well rotted manure, or compost. However, they will also appreciate a regular feed with a liquid fertiliser. Something such as a liquid seaweed feed you can buy from most garden centres. Or, you could even make your own FREE liquid feed from nettles.
Give Them Lots To Drink
If you allow the soil on your sweet peas to dry out, they are likely to die pretty quickly – or they just won’t give you a good display. Make sure you water your plants every morning and evening if it’s going to be a warm day. Keep an eye on how the soil looks and water as needed. You can also place mulch or even a layer of gravel around the base of your plants to ensure they stay moist.
Pinch Off The Tops
This step might seem very counterproductive, however, it will be worth it!
When your plants have at least 4 sets of leaves and are around 15cm tall, pinch off the tips of each plant. This will encourage the plant to give off more side shoots, instead of only having one main stem shooting up for the sky. Meaning your plants will become more bushy and have more flowers per plant. However, you don’t have to do this is if you don’t mind having taller, more spindly plants.
Keep Picking Those Flowers
Picking flowers from plants seems like such a bad thing to do. Essentially killing a flower that was perfectly happy growing away. However, when it comes to sweet peas, as we touched on earlier, the more you pick the flowers, they more they will produce.
In fact, if you don’t pick the flowers from your sweet peas, you’re basically telling the plant it’s time to stop flowering and start seeding instead. When a plant starts seeding, it thinks the growing season is over and will start putting it’s energy into creating seeds to survive instead of making your beautiful flowers.
Pick big bunches regularly and you’ll be helping your plants last longer, and giving the bees more food at the same time.
Will you be growing sweet peas this growing season?
Sweet peas have one of the most beautiful fragrances, in my opinion. You can’t be unhappy if you’re smelling sweet peas, amirite?
So true! They smell amazing, look pretty and keep on coming.