Sweet Peas! I'm going to have SWEET PEAS!

The amount i gave away at the start of this year..................... there must be sweet peas all over the USA.
I think i even sent you some didn't i Suzy????????????????

Mark

Oh, those darn Swet Peas! They HATE Indiana. It just gets too hot too fast, and instead of turning brown in July, they turn brown 1st of June. I had about 3 bunches of flowers, and that was it. BUT they smelled heavenly, so I think I should have started them in the summer for fall bloom, maybe. I don'r know, but they are rare here, so probably with a good reason, our weather. Zinnias, now Zinnias are in hog heaven here..

Suzy

Hmm - I wonder if I'll have the same problem here. I think our winters are still a little too cold for planting them now, although our daytime temps are still in the 80s...?

Pagancat,

On Sweet Peas, it's not the temps in winter so much as the number of hours per day of light. To grow, most of them need 14 hours per day and in Nov - Dec - Jan, maybe even February, you won't get that. Bloom is also triggered by INCREASING light in terms of each day being a little longer (as opposed to Chrysanthemums where decreasing light triggers bloom).

Suzy

I found the best time to plant Sweet Peas in Pretoria (no frost in winter) is mid summer (end of January). That way the plants can put on a lot of growth, and start flowering late Autumn and carry on flowering during winter. I left it until Easter this year, and just didn't get a good show. I'm letting a lot of the flowers go to seed (ordered "Sweet Pea Elegant Ladies" from T&M beginning of the year and although the flowers are smaller than the modern hybrids, the scent is absolutely divine). As soon as the temperatures increase they start getting powdery mildew and rust. I let nature do her thing in my garden, so as soon as that happens they are removed.
Maybe you can experiment with starting your seeds a bit earlier?

Good luck,
Elsa

Hey Elsa! I love it when folks from another part of our world chime in.

So... your Easter would be approximately this time for us now, being in the other hemisphere - maybe I'll give it a try. I got some cheap knockoffs, that were marked down, so they're good for experimenting with.

Thanks!

And thanks for that snippet, too, Suzy - that makes sense.

I did sweet peas for the first time this year and they did pretty well. I had them in a self-watering planter (a big, deep one). They bloomed pretty well until the beginning of August. I cut them back some and they're blooming again now, but not profusely.

Oh Eleanor, they're beautiful. Are they climbing a trellis attached to the window or what? At first I thought they were standing up that way by themselves, but I know that's pretty impossible.

xx, C

Gram, those look great!

If mine had looked like that, I would have kept them around!

Suzy

Hi, Carrie. It's me, Jan, aka Eleanor LOL. I stuck a flattened tomato cage in the planter.

they were so pretty, but didn't smell as good as I thought they would. maybe it's my 'smeller'

*sigh*

Lovely!

There are types of sweetpeas that will bloom with less than 10 hourse of sunshine.

Yes, I found one of those, and I sowed it this spring along with Mark's. They weren't any happier than the 11 and 12 hour ones. I did have one very, very fragrant one bloom. Just a couple of flowers, which was all I had blooming at any given moment, smelled just wonderful, but they were small flowers of a sort of dead-purple color with a lot of gray in it. Nothing like gram's photo above with the big bright red flowers.

One thing I have to remember is that all the gorgeous photos of them, the really, really gorgeous ones of thick full full-flowering vines are not only from a totally different climate in England, but also of Sweet Pea enthusiasts. If you know anything about single-genus plant enthusiasts, I think it can be safetly said that they will do just about anything, spend any amount of time, etc., getting the biggest, best plant or flower they can. And really, I just wanted to stick some seeds in a pots and have Sweet Peas.

I also think SP plant growth and flowers are triggered by the little daily incremental increases in daylength that you get in spring, as opposed to the opposite increments in fall. I have nothing to prove it, except I know a lot of local flower gardeners, and no one grows Sweet Peas. They all grow unusual things that aren't hardy here, and are always taking chances, but no fall Sweet Peas. Hmm, no Spring Sweet Peas, either.

Suzy

Which means you would be the only one.... >grin< ...

Ooops = forgot you have the daffies!

Sweetpeas are supposed to be one of the easiest flowers to grow on the planet... yet I have never ever ever ever had success with them. Oh, I'm good at growing the foliage though... Sheesh. I

'm green with envy! They're gorgeous.

There are different smelling sweet peas, Eleanor, I mean some are identified as particularly fragrant vs. others that are red or bicolored or tall or trailing or short, blah blah whatever. How I do run on about things I don't know that much about!

Get in line, Carrie, you're right behind me, lol.

Is there a line? I'm so sorry - I thought there was just a big mob of us hanging around surging forward with uneducated suggestions for stuff.

LMBO -- too true!!!

Wow, great thread. I'm going to try sweet peas for the first time this coming spring. Glad I stopped in or I would have dropped them in the ground around April! Hehe... Guess I better plan on getting to work after Christmas and get these going inside. A few questions on loose ends in the thread:

Did you end up pinching them back a little as they first started growing? If so, did that help them get bushier?
Did the cold temps end up killing Suzan's afterall? We often get unexpected freezes late in spring here in Colorado and I'd like to know if I can put my plants out before those or if I should wait.

One more thing, I have some Honeysuckle growing on trellis' in part shade that are pretty bare at the bottom, would the sweet peas work ok at the base do you think?

I need to stop reading all these threads, now I must have SPs next spring, and the newspaper pots sound perfect, and I never thought of smashing down a tomato cage for a trellis, and and and.....

I plan to give them one more shot -- I'll put them directly in the ground, probably in January or February at the latest. They're too pretty not to have!!!

KTalia,

Despite having really bad luck with them, I think I can actually answer some of your questions!


Yes, Pinch them. I think it's after they get 5, 6 or 7 leaves. (Different experts recommend different things, but I can tell you that it makes a difference as to how long the stem is before the first leaf comes out. If it's like 6", then pinch at 5 leaves, but if it's one inch, then pinch at 7 leaves. That last sentence might not make sense until after you see the seedlings, then it will make sense.)

My temps got down to 23 degrees and didn't phase them.

I planted mine directly in a big plastic-that-looks-like-terra cotta pot. I only used 7 seeds and should have doubled it - or tripled. I cut some green plastic chicken wire fencing to length -- it comes in a roll already in a circle around the inside perimeter of the pot, and wove some stakes in and out and the stakes went into the pot. It was not attractive, but it wasn't awful. Would have been totally acceptable if I had used 14 seeds instead of 7.

I htink these things take a lot more fertilizer than what comes with Miracle Grow Potting soil....you might want to do some research on that. I kept looking at them and thinking they needed fertilizer -- this was before they totally burned up :)

I don't know about your Honeysuckle trellis, but I don't see why it wouldn't be wonderful. EXCEPT these can be a bit leggy at the bottom, too.

Suzy

Leggy too aye. Thanks for the great info. My mom used to grow these things all over our yard when I was girl in Oregon. It surprises me that they would need so much in the way of fertilizer, but I'll keep that in mind too.

I'm so excited for spring since this is my first year with anything that amounts to a real space to grow flowers. I'm tearing down an old dog run over the winter and I was thinking of recycling the chain sections by mounting them around in various places along my wood privacy fence to grow some climbing things on to soften the area up a little bit. I was just thinking as an alternative, I could hang pots of sweet peas at various levels on one of the segments like art work! I think that sounds like a lot of fun. Of course, my husband will just laugh at me like always when I tell him. Hehe... But then most of the time my ideas don't end up to bad and he apologizes later. I think he's starting to just go with things more these days.

My husband GROWLS at me! I think your chain link fence idea is great! The successful sweet peas I had, I grew in the back yard against a chain link fence and they loved it. I think they prefer climbing to trailing; at least for me, I keep planting them in hanging pots expecting them to trail and they don't.

But I had that same hanging pot idea except DH put eye hooks in the part of the roof that overhangs the house, I forget what it's called, but he purt these hooks up WAY high so we had to use chain to have the pots dangle low enough so one can see them. Anyway, hey look much sillier than the hook that's attached directly to the wall with a, hmmm, well it's like a sideways letter J with a long straight part and a short hook at the end to hold the planter and of course a little bracket to attach to the wall.

Lol! Carrie on the husband growling!

Ktalia, run over to the Cottage Garden forum and look for early, early posts by Susan aka Lincolnitess. They should be on page one when we first got the forum and titled "Show us your Cottage Garden" or something close. She successfully used the fencing sections and it was just absolutely charming.

I'd post a link for you, but dinner calls, well, it's calling me to start it before Mr. Clean gets home and has somehting else to growl about. LOL!

Suzy

I planted mine the end of March. I was so afraid it was too late. And I didn't pinch them. They did pretty well. I only planted 6 seeds and all 6 germinated. Next year I will:

1. plant them earlier
2. plant more of them
3. pinch them back

I don't know about fertilizer. Legumes are nitrogen fixers, so I thought they didn't a lot of extra fert. But don't take my word on that. This is some leftover info rattling around in my brain from when I used to have a larger veggie garden.

here's one of the other colors in that mix. there is also supposed to be white, but I didn't get any with my 6 seeds.

Wow! That red is eye popper! Love them.

I looked for the post that might have the chain link fence, but I'm still not finding it. But she has a lot of pictures and links to look through! In any case, I'm finding a lot of fun stuff in the process.

Hi all! I'm enjoying the Sweet pea banter, and am soooo glad it's not just me who has had these issues with them. I've always read they like lots of organic matter (especially manure), and that did seem to make them happy the one time I had success. I had the same concern about fertilizer as you, grampapa, so I just used a bloom booster type (low N, higher P&K) after they got a good start.

Oh, and speaking of trailing/hanging basket use, I tried one called 'Cupid' this spring. Its a pink/rose bicolor and very dwarfed and bushy. Ultimately I failed with them (I moved after starting them, then neglected them while moving the gardens), but I did see a few blooms and with care I believe they will be a good window box candidate.

I didn't catch much scent from mine either. I believe a lot of blooms need to be present for the fragrance to really carry (sort of like pansies/violets, can't smell one, but the whole flat smells sweet).

Have any of you tried Wintersowing sweet peas? Seems like that may work well for them.

We are a determined bunch, if there's a will, there's a way, LOL. Good luck to all!
Neal

I wintersowed some, got pretty foliage but no blooms. But I was awash with seedlings - a lot was going on. Yes, they are good candidates for wintersowing.

Seandor - are you watching this thread - do you know how to work the FF spellcheck? For me it's a typo-check....

xx, C

Thanks Carrie, good to know :)

What is FF Check? I need it! I can't type worth a darn!

Suzy

What's the FF spell check? Inquiring minds want to know!

Firefox will spell check for you. I just don't like that it doesn't include words I've added as suggestions. And I would LOVE to be able to remove some dumb words from their dictionary. I like MS Word's spellcheck pretty well.

If it knew it was checking for typos, maybe it would know that I always missed the shift key and tyoe /i for I. Bu it thinks /i is a fine word! If it had any sense at all, it would know that when I type "tyoe" I didn't quite stretch far enough for the "p" and it's meant as "type". It should get to know me and the words I use often. It should make suggestions in the order of the frequency I use them, not alphabetically or some other even stupider hierarchy.

Both Firefox and the Google toolbar will do spell check for you - unless you're on a Mac....#*&^#$

??? I'm on a Mac using FF and Google. Both work for me.

Yes, but does the spell check work for you?

Sorry, that's what I meant.... the spell check from both works for me. I get red underlines for words spelled incorrectly. When I right click I get the menu of suggestions to replace it with.

Huh... wonder if it's my internet settings or sumptin' ... as soon as I switched over to the Mac I stopped getting all the little red lines.

I know nothing about this Mac, otherwise I would offer some tips. (chuckle) I just know it has always worked for me. Good luck.