I’m still in the whirlwind of my first season of growing flowers. And even though there are so many species and varieties that have yet to bloom, I have become completely obsessed with sweet peas!
I was a little late planting them out this year since there were irrigation and soil amendment related delays. It was about a week after our last hard frost that I planted the seedlings. I didn’t see blooms until the weekend after the Fourth of July. Granted, this spring was very cold with freezing temperatures in June and we received endless amounts of rain after a heavy snowpack, so had more water than I really knew what to do with.
Sweet Peas in bloom. My new favorite flower.
Once the sweet peas started blooming though, they exploded and have been producing hundreds of stems each week! I’ve learned that the more flowers I harvest, the more flowers with longer stems I’m rewarded with the following week.
Going into our fourth week of productive blooms, we’re facing a heatwave of triple digits that will last ten days. Fortunately, our evenings are still dropping to around 60°F. So I’m holding out hope that when things cool down again I’ll continue to see new blooms.
I’ve been loving to mix them in with greenery foraged around the property, but really they don’t need any help standing out. There were so many days that I wasn’t sure if I would ever want to grow sweet peas again. Days when they should have been planted out but were tangling with each other in starter trays. Days we spent hours amending the soil and digging trenches of manure to give them a little boost once their roots established. Weeks where I was shielding them from hail and freezing rain. And days where I was hand watering them while we worked on finding a solution to irrigate.
But now I don’t think I could go a season without them. They charming and untamed. They’re just incredible flowers.
Planning for 2023, I’m looking at decreasing the number of varieties (for sweet peas I planted nineteen different colors), starting my seeds in a greenhouse, and planting out 6-8 weeks before our last frost. I’m also looking at building permanent trellis structures with tree posts and metal mesh. The hortonova netting gets snipped easily and the soil for these guys is easily manageable to amend without tilling.
