The longer days are quickly returning, and my thoughts now turn to what I will grow in 2019. I’ve started placing seed orders, and with each envelope that appears through the mail slot I get more excited by the possibilities ahead.
An especially important package arrived last week with my sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus) seeds from Roger Parsons. Since moving to Britain I have become a bit obsessed by sweet peas, most likely because they were impossible to grow well in my native Virginia climate. It just got too hot, too fast for them in the spring.
When I was living in Edinburgh I grew my first sweet peas supported by jute netting attached to the front of my house. They didn’t have much root run in their raised planter, but I got decent-enough blooms that I was hooked. They were so intricate and sensual with their ruffled flowers and evocative scent. They seemed the antithesis of zinnias, cosmos, and all the other bold, scentless hot-climate flowers I’d grown in Virginia. I slept with sweet pea posies on my nightstand that summer, and knew I’d grow sweet peas as long as I lived in Britain.
Last year—my first in Kent—I sowed my sweet pea seeds on Feb. 27 into root trainers. I didn’t knick, soak, or otherwise adulterate the seeds before sowing, though I do know one expert who germinates all his seed on damp paper towels before sowing to avoid any root trainer cells coming up blind. As is best practice, I labeled my cells with date and variety before sowing. My seeds germinated in the airing cupboard by March and then they went right outside into the cold frame. When each seedling had four true leaves I pinched off the top to encourage lateral branching.
When it was finally dry enough to work the soil I created a new bed in a section of my lawn that over winter stood pretty boggy and wet. Once the new bed, which was 16 feet long, was cut in I dumped a few bags of compost and manure into it along with handfuls of fish, blood, and bone. I heaped the soil up to create a somewhat drier planting bed and then cut some eight-foot poles in the forest, pounded them in, and strung jute netting between them.
The seedlings dragged along during our long, cold spring (as we all did) until I finally planted them out on April 22. I covered them with fleece for a week or so to discourage the pigeons. Each day I’d check them and patiently encourage the tiny tendrils to grasp the lowest strings of the netting. It always takes a while for them to get their roots going, during which time they don’t look like they are going to do much. But as the temperatures warm and they get established they soon shoot up. From then there is no holding them back as they stretch to the sky.
I watered them regularly, gave them a weekly feed of Tomorite and had my first blooms by mid-June when the stems were a bit more than half-way up their supports.
In another month, they had reached the top of their supports and were flowering so profusely that each dead-heading and harvesting session, which I did religiously to keep them blooming, took up to an hour. I drowned in blooms, harvesting fistfuls at a time and running out of vases in the house to hold them all. I felt so rich.
We had an atypically hot and dry summer last year, and I think the moisture-holding qualities of their location actually worked in the sweet peas’ favor. They kept blooming pretty well into August, when the constant baking and the lack of any more room to grow started to brown them out. They revived a bit in cooler temperatures, leading to me believe that without such extreme weather they would have happily grown all summer, but by then I was so tired of tending them that I thanked them for their service and cleared the bed.
In all, the 2018 sweet peas were a great success, and there isn’t much I’d change about their cultivation other than to grow fewer plants of each variety so that I have more flexibility with my arrangements. I do dream about having even more space to grow them, though that may be a mixed blessing given how time-intensive it is to keep them deadheaded so they don’t run to seed at the expense of flowers. I’ve ordered my 2019 line-up, which I will introduce soon, and in the next post I’ll share the varieties I’ve grown and my thoughts on each.