Sarah Raven's Kitchen and Garden

This guide to growing sweet peas from will show you how to create fanastic summer sweet pea displays in your garden.  You can sow your sweet pea seeds in March but growing sweet peas over winter will produce stronger, more robust plants.

• Sow your sweet peas seeds anytime in March, or from October until Christmas, two seeds to a pot. I usually use root trainers – long, thin pots or cardboard loo rolls – for my sweet peas. All legumes, these included,  like growing with a long root run. So deep pots like these are ideal. Push seeds in to about an inch below the surface of the multi-purpose compost. Dampen the surface and then push each seed in with your finger.
• Cover the pots with newspaper, or a polystyrene tile to keep moisture and warmth in and light out. Some heat will speed up germination, but is not essential.
•  It’s very important to set a mousetrap near your sweet peas. Mice love the seed and your whole crop may disappear in one go. You can soak the seeds in liquid paraffin over night to make them unpalatable and put your mice population off.
• Check for germination every day. Once the seedlings appear, keep them cool at about 5 degrees centigrade. This promotes root and not stem growth. A cold greenhouse, or cold frame is ideal, but your plants will be fine in a light potting shed.
• Pinch out the leader - the growing tip - when there are three or four pairs already grown. Just squeeze it off between your finger and thumb, reducing the plant to one to two inches in height. This promotes vigorous side shoot formation -the energy of the plant going into growing out, not up.

Planting out sweet peas
When the roots have filled the Rootrainer, plant them out.

• Dig in a barrow load of organic material around the base of a teepee or frame. Farmyard manure is good for sweet peas. It helps retain water on a freely drained soil and gently feeds these hungry plants. On very freely-drained soil tear newspapers into strips and put these in the trench too. They’ll help hold onto water.
• Place each pot with two sweet pea plants in it 5-7cm away from the support -a teepee, an arch, or a tunnel, so you’re planting two plants - 1 pot, 8-10 inches apart at the base of every upright. Surround them with slug prevention. I use at least a foot wide strip of washed inland sharp sand, two inches deep, all round mine. It acts as a path for picking later on and should keep the slugs at bay.
• As the young sweet pea plants begin to grow, tie them into the frame, don’t leave them to flop around. They’ll grow more quickly and make stronger plants tied in regularly, once a fortnight for the first month and then more often when they start to romp away.
• If you garden on poor soil, feed your sweet pea plants with a general fertilizer every couple of weeks. A potash-rich tomato feed is ideal. I don’t feed mine, gardening on a rich, heavy, clay soil.
• Professional and serious amateur growers, who are going to compete in horticultural shows will tell you to pinch out all the curly stems. They take energy from the flowers, and attach themselves to flower stems and bend them into curves. It’s a lot of work on the scale of a tunnel. I try to remove any I see while I pick, but I don’t get bogged down.
• Then just let them get on with it and pick, pick, pick. If you see any seed pods as you’re cutting, snip these off as well. You don’t want your plants forming seed or it will stop the plants producing flowers.

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Sometimes you just have to go straight up the middle. It’s very tempting to think that you should always be looking for the new, the exotic, the excitingly unfamiliar, the sort of presence in your garden that will make people pause and ask ‘What’s that’, or say ‘I’ve never seen one of those before’ to which you can gratifyingly answer ‘Oh don’t you know Eschscholzia siberitica or Rodontine epitheleum’?

But there are some things - in fact the most satisfying and valuable things in the garden - which aren’t like that at all and the more mainstream and normal they are and the more often they come round again and again, the more you will love them. And of course in this category, as well as huge drifts of snowdrops in the grass, and really big, blousy cabbage roses, are the sweet peas.

When I was giving a talk, I showed a slide of my current favourite sweet pea, the very fresh pink, ‘Painted Lady’ and afterwards a woman came up to me and said ‘Your ‘Painted Lady’ flowers look nice and big. Mine are always rather small. What can I do to improve them?’ But of course my lovely pink sweet peas only looked big because they were projected onto a wall six feet tall. As I had to tell the woman, in reality they are no bigger than hers, about two-thirds the size of modern hybrids and there’s not much you can do to make them any bigger. That is just what they are. And the reason that they are such a wonderful flower is that they are what they are. They are very close to the wild sweet pea and because of that, they have all the undistorted virtues of the species which is partly their pinkness and prettiness, but more than that, it’s their incredible smell.

So if it’s scent you want, not showiness and glamour, the varieties you need to look out for are the truly old-fashioned types. We do simple close-your-eye tests here every year with twenty stems held in a bunch with a rubber band. I get as many people as I can around the kitchen table and then one by one I pass the bunches round. Without looking at the flower, just using their noses and judging the strength of smell, every one gives them a mark out of ten for each one. Only the eight out of ten or above make it and they’re the ones that will be grown in the garden the following year.

The only exception to the strength of scent rule is Lathyrus chloranthus. It’s acid-green with small flowers and is slower to germinate and grow than most and it has no scent, not a trace, but I love it for its looks alone. If you float the flowers with just a tiny section of stem in a shallow bowl, the green looks wonderful in contrast to any colour and surprisingly sweet peas last better used like this than they do in a vase.

I grow my sweet peas up over a hazel stick tunnel in the vegetable garden. I replace the sweet peas with runner beans or last year I chose the triffid-like cup and saucer plant Cobaea scandens, a wonderful half-hardy annual climber which looks exactly as it sounds, a decent-sized cup sitting on a green calyx saucer. My sweet pea tunnel is home-made, using hazel poles pushed into the ground down both sides of the path, with thinner sticks bent in a hoop between the two and tied with a bit of wire and twine.

I also grow sweet peas over teepees, which look like a witches broom made from silver birch or hazel. These are much better than anything bought. Every beautiful woven willow frame I’ve ever seen is far too short and delicate for the rampant growth you’ll get from almost any annual climber and bamboo canes need metres of twine circled round and round to give the sweet peas enough to climb on.

Hazel or silver birch, bought as pea sticks at an old-fashioned garden centre win the day with me. The uprights need to be at least eight foot tall allowing for a foot to be sunk in the ground to hold them up in autumn gales. Just push a circle of eight poles into the ground. The circle should be about a metre across. Gather the eight uprights together with a piece of wire or twine at the top.