Category — Vines

Coming Out from the Cold

The first sweet peas I ever saw were growing on my great-aunt’s chain-link fence, an otherwise ugly thing between the driveway and yard of her little L.A. house. It must have been winter, because that’s when sweet peas bloom in L.A. I was three or four years old, so it was a high fence to me, and I looked at sun shining through the pink, purple, and red wings, and wanted to stay there and drink them in as long as I could. I still feel that way about sweet peas. That’s a good thing, because it’s something of a pain to grow sweet peas in my area.

In fact, from what I read from other gardeners, they’re something of a pain to grow in other areas, too. But sweet peas inspire hopeful devotion: we try again, year after year, because when they flourish, sweet peas are a memorable enchantment.

What makes them hard to grow in my area is spring weather that heats up fast. Most sweet peas faint and die in hot weather. Yet they need sun to bloom generously, so you can’t shelter them with semi-shade. For many years, my sweet pea vines died off when they were only a couple of feet high: it just got too hot. I’ll be honest: a lot of years that still happens.

It was procrastination and ignorance that taught me one of the best tricks for sweet peas in hot summers. I planted some really really late in spring. All through the summer, I watered them devotedly (this was before I knew that sweets peas don’t like heat), hoping that somehow they would grow and flourish. They stayed only a few inches high. Not a flower in sight.The payoff came the next spring: peas easily live through freezing weather, and the minute it got warm, they took off like gangbusters, twining all over the twig fence I’d built and blooming like crazy. It’s the best sweet pea year I ever had; they bloomed their heads off for a couple of months and were totally gorgeous.

By accident, I had gotten two things right: I’d planted them so they had a head start in the spring, and I’d given them twigs to twine around.

The moral: if your spring weather heats up quick, the trick is to plant sweet peas at the end of summer, like cool-weather vegetable crops. (You could plant garden peas then, too: they have the same requirements.) Life being life, I have not managed to do this all the time. But if you get sweet peas in while it’s still cold, you’ll give them a head start. Even if it’s freezing or there’s snow on the ground, the peas will be fine. They are polar bears of the temperate plant world.

For warm-winter gardeners, my old Victory Garden book from the forties says peas can be planted all year. (Remember, as far as planting seasons go, edible peas and sweet peas like the same things.) I wish I’d been old enough to find out when my LA great-aunt planted hers. All I know is it’s unlikely to have been summer, because I wasn’t hot standing transfixed on the driveway admiring the sweet peas. I have a hard time believing you could get anything out of sweet peas from hot middle-of-the-summer plantings (unless it works like my accidental planting, and blooms the next cool season). But maybe if you’re one of those Diligent Gardeners who use shade cloths and misting, you could make it work.

I seem to be bringing up a lot of older books in my posts. That’s because I have a lot of second-hand books in my garden library, partly because they are cheap to buy at library and garage sales, and partly because, weirdly enough, there are styles in gardening as there are in other areas. (Cookbooks suffer the same distinction.) So while a newer book may have something an older one doesn’t, the reverse may also be true.

More on sweet peas next post. Feel free to leave a sweet pea comment yourself.

Reference: Vegetables in the California Garden: Victory Garden Edition, Ross H. Gast, Murray & Gee, Inc. 1943, pg. 20

Twiners and Climbers

I was tying up twine on a trellis for my sweet peas today—a tedious job, but one that pays off, because sweet peas don’t come into glorious bloom unless they have something to twine around.

It took me a long while to find out that there are twiner vines and climber vines, and if you give a vine the wrong support, it sulks. I gave my sweet peas bamboo trellises and they did nothing, despite all my coddling. I finally became enlightened when I bought an old Brooklyn Botanical Garden pamphlet at some library sale or thrift shop. The pamphlet explained that there are twiner vines and climber vines, and they need different types of support. If you don’t give a vine the type of support it needs, then it languishes. That’s why my sweet peas lolled against the bamboo trellises and the cool twine trellises I crocheted them: I wasn’t giving them what they needed.

Sweet peas are twiner vines: they need to spiral themselves around something to grow and thrive. And they need those supports before they are high enough to fall over, or they will never do well.

But as I write this, I’m starting to wonder: sweet peas have tendrils, which would imply that they’re designed to grab on to things, and I know that there are net fences specifically designed for peas. If anyone has the ultimate word on this, I’d be delighted to hear it. All I know is that sweet peas do better for me when they have skinny supports. And I’m not the only one.

Ruth Stout (in my personal garden writer Hall of Fame) talks about growing peas in her Connecticut garden. While her peas were edible, their requirements are the same as sweet peas. And they apparently require the same tedious work for proper support. She describes how she told her friend Scott Nearing that she had to have 240 feet of peas, but she couldn’t face getting the brush for all of them.

When he asked her why she had to have so many peas, she said, “I don’t know.”A man wise in the ways of obsession, he told her not to worry, so she planted the seed, “thinking—well, not thinking, I guess, not trying to figure out what magic Scott had used to keep them from needing brush. He said not to worry and he never used idle words.”One morning she finds him in her garden, putting in a truckload of brush supports for her peas. He’d driven from Vermont to Connecticut to bring them.

This would be my ideal way to support sweet peas. Unfortunately, I don’t have any garden-magician friends, so I’ve resigned myself to spending a few hours tying twine on my trellises every few years. (Hemp twine is strong, looks good in the garden, and lasts in the weather longer than you would think possible for a piece of string. End of commercial.) I’m glad I don’t have to do twine for 240 feet of sweet peas—but that many sweet peas sounds like a wonderful idea–if only I could get somebody else to do the supports. For now I’ll have to rely on audio books to keep me entertained enough to persist for several feet of trellis.

Next post we’ll get into planting times for sweet peas—especially for climates with short springs and hot summers.

References:

Handbook on Vines, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, BBG 1972. The BBG handbooks, past and present, are collections of monographs on a single given subject, written by people who know a lot about the field. No fluff, good pictures, and plenty of information in a small space. (No, I didn’t get paid to write this!)

How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back, Ruth Stout, Cornerstone Library 1976 (reprint), pg. 33-34