January and February are great months to start your sweet pea flowers. Sweet pea flowers are beautiful, easy to grow flowers that give an instant lift and pop of colour to your garden. They can be growing up trellis, a bean structure or even over a teepee (making a super impressive hide out for the kids!)
Not all varieties or sweet peas have that beautiful, delicate scent though. Varieties such as Linda Carole, Matucana and Graniflora are the ones to go to for that dainty fragrance. Spencers and Old fashioned forms of sweet peas usually have longer stems, making them the perfect choice for picking and placing into vases.
Sweet peas are a lot hardier than we used to believe they were. They can actually tolerate a light frost, making them great additions to the garden in early March, just before temperatures really start to warm up. By starting your sweet peas under cover, in a green house or on a windowsill, in January or February, you can get a head start on the growing season and Harden them up a little.
HOW TO START SWEET PEA FLOWERS
The best way to start sweet pea flowers is by soaking the seeds in water overnight. This encourages good germination. You can place your seeds onto a piece of wet kitchen towel kept in a clear container, like a Tupperware box. This stops them from drying out. When you see the seeds have germinated, you’re ready to pot on.
You don’t have to do this step, but it definitely helps with germination success.
Next, place your seeds into 7 or 9cm pots with some good compost. Place into a greenhouse or on a sunny windowsill and keep watered.
TO PINCH OR NOT TO PINCH?
Pinching out your sweet peas is something you do in order to encourage bushier growth.
To explain in laments terms, by picking out the top of the plant, the plant feels under threat. It knows that there is imminent danger up ahead and so in response, it starts to send out more side shoots.
It is on these side shoots that the flowers grow. So more side shoots equals more flowers!
Some people swear by pinching out their sweet pea flowers, others say it makes little difference. What we do know is that it doesn’t hurt the plant, so why not experiment?!
Pinch out the top of the plant, down to the first two leaves. Your plant should be about 4 inches tall before pinching out and starting to flop a little.
HOW TO SUPPORT SWEET PEA FLOWERS
Sweet pea flowers like to grow tall. So supporting them is important. You can plant sweet peas along a trellis, up a bean structure or why not try over a teepee!
Sweet pea flowers can be planted out in small bunches, so no need to separate the plants if you have sown multiple flowers together. Whack them out somewhere nice and sunny (somewhere that gets around 6 hours of sun a day should work well) and tie in as they grow.
CARING FOR SWEET PEA FLOWERS
Be sure to pick sweet pea flowers regularly to prolong their flowering season. If you start to see seed heads appearing, quickly pull them off as these mean the plant is starting to go to seed and will soon stop flowering.
Also, I’ve found that pulling off the excess of tendrils (those thin, green spindly things that grow off the stem), helps to prolong the flowering season.
As your plant gets going, it should be able to cling on by itself, but do tie in if particularly windy weather is predicted as they can peel away from the structure!
Hope this gives you lots of advice about how to grow sweet pea flowers. They are absolutely beautiful and make a lovely addition to any garden! Happy gardening!
