Everyone loves sweet peas don’t they? A quintessential British summer scent that wafts in the air as you pass their blooms, they also make great cut flowers to bring that scent into your home.
There are two schools of thought as regards sowing sweet peas; they can be sown in the autumn and overwintered thereby allowing you to plant out stronger and bigger plants in the spring, or they can be sown later in spring itself either in pots, or if you are really late you can direct sow them in the ground as late as April.
If you are sowing them in the autumn, the growing tip will need to be pinched out to encourage secondary growth and to stop the plants getting too leggy.
As I forgot to sow mine in the autumn and with my sowing fingers starting to get a little twitchy, I have sown mine in mid January this year. I have a selection of colours and varieties. I’m pretty sure I had some lovely red ones too somewhere, but can I find them?
The seeds themselves are quite large and round and are easy to sow as a result. I filled some pots with compost the day before I needed them and brought them inside so the compost warmed up a bit. No one, not even a tiny seedling, wants to dip their toe or first shoot into cold compost!
I sow mine five seeds to a pot spread evenly over the surface, I then just push them in about a fingernail’s depth and then cover them. Water and place the pots somewhere fairly warm to help germination.
Hey presto! A week later the first seed has germinated!
We’ll do an update in a month or two once the seedlings have got going a bit more.