Grow Your Own Sweet Peas Best Varieties Growing Tips Arranging

So this year, a dear old friend of mine inspired me to create a cut flower garden. And of course, one of the things I had to grow were sweet peas. There's a bit of a problem. You can't eat sweet peas. But does that mean that they don't deserve a place in a kitchen garden with a primary function of growing food? Absolutely not. Today's video is an ode to sweet peas. Sweet peas are a much loved plant in many gardens, and there are two core reasons. One is scent and the other is beauty. When you go into a garden and you see sweet peas, you just can't help but feel like a little joy. The pops of color, even when everything else is feeling nice and green, the pops of color, they just bring so much to the garden. And there are so many different colors to choose from. In fact, there are hundreds of varieties of sweet peas with more being added every year where both gardeners and breeders are selecting for things like color, the texture on the petals, the length of stem, and also their scent, which is the other benefit of sweet peas. If you are blindfolded and you walk around a garden, you would know quite quickly when there's sweet peas about. And one of the things that you can do with the scent is harvest it in the form of bouquets, and you can enjoy the lovely scent of sweet peas at home. I always have this dilemma, though, when it comes to sweet peas. Do I enjoy them in the garden or do I enjoy them back home on the kitchen table or in the lounge? And as with everything, it's about balance. And I try and enjoy both. I try and enjoy the sweet peas here in the garden, but I also try and make sure that I do take them home and also share them with other people. Now, a general rule of thumb, if you're wanting to cut sweet peas to take them home to enjoy, is that you want to find stems, ideally long, and you want to find stems where there were one or two unopened flower buds. This will mean that you'll have a vast life of around five days. Now, me being me, often I miss that opportunity and I'm cutting when they're in their full bloom, looking fantastic, and so the vast life might only be two or three days, but it is still absolutely worth it. And because sweet peas are such a productive plant, after that two or three days, I can put the discards on the compost and I can come back out to the garden and cut the same again. And arranging sweet peas is easy because they are so beautiful, they don't need another element in the bouquet. You just get a fistful of sweet peas, stick it in a vase, and kind of Bob's your uncle, as they say here in the UK. Maybe they say it in America as well, but they do stand up to themselves. If you find, as the season progresses, the stems getting shorter, which is kind of one of the kind of drawbacks of sweet peas, the stems get shorter as the season ends, but there are workarounds. For example, you can just find vases that are a lot shorter, so it can compensate for the shortening stem, or you get something like a pin frog for flowers. And my farm was sweet peas, which I have been growing for many years, but this year I've given it a proper go and I'll share my five favorite varieties of this year a little later on. But they're kind of one of the things that have shown me that sometimes harvest from a garden don't have to be edible. And the way that I see it as a gardener is if I am eating a meal that comes from the garden, I can also look and enjoy the garden in the form of flowers, not just sweet peas, but other things. Because as well as being able to stand alone in a bouquet, sweet peas are a lovely addition to doing other bouquets with other flowers. I might wanna try with zinnias and ceteria and poppies, and you can just go wild. I think when it comes to flower arranging, yes, there are certain rules you can follow, but it is also individual. So just kind of do what you enjoy. Now, how exactly do I grow sweet peas? It is really quite simple. In October, I sow three peas per module in a module tray. And over winter, when they get to around five or seven centimeters tall, or two to three inches, I pot them on into nine centimeter pots. And around four weeks before the last average frost date, maybe six weeks, I'll harden them off. And they are a hardy annual, I'll harden them off, and I will transplant them outside. I create a trellis. There's a couple of different styles that you can do. You can either do like a wigwam, or a teepee-style trellis, or an A-frame. And just plant a clump at the base of each cane, tie string around. And as the peas grow, you might need to kind of gently help some of the stems back in, but that is all that you need to do to grow sweet peas. However, like everything in life, there comes chores. When you cook a nice meal, you have to wash up. When you have nice flowers, you have to deadhead. Deadheading is part and parcel of keeping your sweet peas going, blooming strongly. But if you forget to deadhead, don't worry. You can just do it a little later. And I often find that sweet peas respond and kind of give you a second flush later on in summer. But you can also decide, instead of deadheading, or at a certain point of the year, you can stop deadheading, and you can let those seeds set. So a sweet pea seed, when it continues growing, will then create a pod. You can allow that to swell up, to turn brown on the plant, bring it in, dry it for a couple of weeks, and then take out the seeds and put those seeds in a paper envelope to then plant in October. That's the beauty of growing your own sweet peas. You can actually save the seed of them very easily. Now, if you're curious where I got my sweet peas, I got them from Almaproost, because I kind of just love their collection of the more pastel, like the lighter styles. Sometimes sweet peas can be a little bit garish, a little bit too in your face, but I like the kind of the softer feel, the softer focus. And so that's why I head to Almaproost for my sweet peas. Now, the varieties of this year, I'm growing around nine different varieties, but there are five in particular that I adore. So here are my top five varieties that I'm growing this year. First is David Tostevin, then Castle Wellen, if that's how you pronounce it. I also grew Piggy Sooth, Misty, and finally, of course, is King's Ransom, which is quite a trending one this year, and for good reason. So of course it has to make my list, because, you know, I got to stick with the crowds. Now, a common question that comes up is, are sweet peas good for pollinators? And I always thought, yeah, they're not the best, and they aren't the best, and that's okay, but they do have a modest benefit, particularly to things like bees and bumblebees. So yes, it will help pollinators. It's better than having nothing, but it isn't something as powerful as other flowers, like umbelifers or alliums. What I love about having sweet peas in the garden, though, is how it does create that structure. Very often, if I'm growing lots of vegetables, it can feel quite green, and so having something like a tower of sweet peas in and amongst the green just creates such a nice effect, and because of its height, it can cast shade, which means behind the sweet peas, it's a perfect opportunity to grow leafy greens, and in the front, I've got a bit of a sun trap, so I can maximize that sun trap by planting things like outdoor cucumbers. Sweet peas require little space, yet they yield generously, and they are very popular for good reason. Now, life can be hard, so why not make sure that you create a little space in your garden to grow some sweet peas and perhaps some other flowers to experience joy. Joy is one of the things that we can harvest from a garden, and it kind of forces us, when we see a beautiful flower, to take a moment, to forget everything else that is going on, to just be in the present and enjoy the garden, and then you'll probably get rudely awakened by a bumblebee trying to get that flower as well, but that's okay.