Sweet pea growing guide 🌿 The best smelling flowers!

can you just smell them okay maybe not yet but we're gonna get there soon hi everyone aaron from the patient gardener here and today i'm going to tell you how to grow sweet peas so just to be clear the sweet peas that i'm talking about are the annual sweet peas the botanical name is latharus odoratus the odoratus tells you right away these have a fabulous scent these are different as well from the perennial type of sweet peas you might have heard of or the sweet peas that you would eat these are inedible plants i'm also sort of coming at this from the perspective of a person who likes to grow these in my garden so i'm not growing these for exhibition i'm not growing these specifically for cut flowers so there's a few differences in how you would grow them if you're growing them for those other purposes and there's probably some differences in the varieties that you might choose but i'm just going for pretty plants in the garden basically now sweet peas are a vine they grow about six feet tall for most varieties there are some varieties that are shorter or have a different growth habit but generally speaking we're talking about a vining plant sweet peas are also one of the plants that i think you will find more different ways to grow part of that is because it changes depending on what kind of climate you're growing these in but rather than be confused by all the different information on how to grow sweet peas i think you should take heart in it and take solace in the fact that that just means that there's a lot of ways to grow sweet peas and it's hard to screw it up so where can you grow sweet peas the answer is most places technically they'll grow in a zone two to eleven but the thing that you need to know about sweet peas more than anything else is they don't like heat so if you are in an area that gets quite hot it's important to grow these in seasons where it's cooler because they're just gonna fry out if it gets if they get too hot they will not be happy in that scenario so if you are in zone eight or up this is probably something you're actually going to start in fall and fall planted sweet peas tend to be very strong plants once they get going so it's a really a great option if you're in zone six or cooler this is something you want to start from seed about six to eight weeks before your last frost and if you're in that zone seven range you might have to play around with it and see which way works best for you um because it just depends now if you're gonna start these in a warmer zone you just wanna make sure that if you're planting them out you're planting them in a place where the ground doesn't freeze because that doesn't work it can get cool they can handle a pretty good frost but they can't be in a place where the ground freezes and you can consider a situation where you would start them in pots and then put them in a cold frame so that they didn't freeze and then plant them in late winter or very early spring in the ground so there are a lot of variations on the when of planting sweet peas that are very dependent on your zone so you might have to play around to see what's best for you or even better yet sort of talk to gardeners in your zone who grow them who will be happy to share their information on when you should be thinking about starting your sweet peas okay so the other thing to know about sweet peas is that they do not like root disturbance so you want to look for something to grow them in that is very deep now some people use toilet paper rolls i've personally never done that i've heard great success stories and i've kind of heard some horror stories about the toilet paper rolls falling apart really quickly um personally these days i grow them in what is called a root trainer and i like a very deep root trainer i think this is probably like a seven or eight inch deep root trainer and the cells themselves are four in here are not that big at the top but they're quite deep and these open up like this and so what's nice is that when it comes time to uh plant out your sweet peas you just open this up it's not like you have to pry these out or push these out they just lay flat in there and you pick the whole thing up and you just kind of gently slip it into the soil so i like root trainers but before i use root trainers i used four inch pots and it's not so much the width of the pot that you're worried about you're more worried about the height of the pot because again you want a deep area for roots to get into and that worked just fine this was just an easier way for me to grow more of them in less space and so that's why i switched to root trainers now undoubtedly if you've ever looked into growing sweet peas you've probably heard all kinds of things about soaking them or nicking them and that's because they are like tiny little i'm always trying to find a way to show you guys seeds they are tiny little like pellets almost they're very very hard and they're just little balls they're pretty big seed actually in terms of seed but they're quite hard and so they have the seed coat that you need to get through so i did an experiment many years ago maybe the second or third year i was growing sweet peas to see whether it was worth all this fuss and i soaked i took the same variety of sweet peas i soaked some i nicked some and i did nothing to others and then i planted them in exactly the same conditions this is not a scientific study it was literally three pots you know but it was anecdotal for me and what happened was they all germinated at exactly the same time so root trainers come in in like a cage and that props them all up to hold them upright while you're growing in them and so once you've got seeds planted in there it's very hard to like pull some out and not others and so a couple years ago i had a situation in which one of the varieties that i planted none of them germinated it was just a bad batch and when i got replacements for it i wanted them to catch up with the rest of them and so i pre-sprouted them because i wanted to avoid this germination problem again and so that's now what i do for my sweet peas and all i do is layer my sweet peas between damp paper towel so i just take little pieces of paper towel get them wet in the sink ring them out and then i just layer them up and of course label and we're going to get into how important labeling is here in a second and then they sprout and they sprout super quick in fact the reason why i have many of the sweet peas already in this tray planted is because i forgot how quickly they sprout and i really needed to get them moving on before i had time to make this video so they will sprout in about three days in most cases but i layer them up and i do i mean i have many varieties here layer them up put plastic wrap over the top and i just keep this on the kitchen counter i don't put it on top of heat man or anything it seems plenty warm there and what happens is that you get a seed that looks like this so the first thing you're going to see when your seeds pre-sprout is a little white wiggly thing that's the root then the next thing that comes up is actually the sprout and this one and you can tell because it gets a little green on the tip so it's pretty easy to tell what's what so this is this is beyond when i should have planted it so when they're at when they're at this stage that's about when you want to move these onto pots so just the little white tail coming out which is your roots so whether you're planting in four inch pots or root trainers or toilet paper rolls just use regular potting mix for this one um because like all vines they're hungry they develop roots quickly they are a thick enough fruit on them that they don't need have little fine roots that have to get through a really finely sieved seed starting mix so a regular potting mix will do fine so i am going to just fill up this lat root last route trainer so we can talk about how to plant these plant your sweet peas about an inch deep use whatever you need a pencil a bamboo stick i happen to have a cocktail stir because that's what happens when you're planting in your kitchen and poke a couple of holes in your mix you want to be very careful when you're handling these seedlings when you're using this pre-sprouting method because if you break off either one of these it's pretty much shot so you do have to be have to be real gentle with it and that is probably the main negative of pre sprouting these and if you bury that little seed head that's fine so these are two seeds that were in there that have been soaking now for a week and have are showing no signs of germinating so if i hadn't pre-sprouted these these would still be sitting in those pots so that's the benefit is you know that they are going to work when i do my labels for sweet peas because i grow a lot of different varieties i always write the name the color on it as well so that i have an idea what color is going to be because the names mean nothing to you if you unless you remember what color they are now you can direct sow sweet peas as well and that would be basically as soon as you can work your soil i like to plant these ahead of time because i like to get a jump on the season and it's really about when they're going to grow best so if you're in a warmer zone and you're sort of fighting the heat you're probably going to want to start them ahead of time and then plant them out because they'll have more growing time to get flowering before you get so hot here it's actually just a matter of our growing season being kind of short and i'm sort of impatient go figure that way so i like to just plant them ahead of time but direct sewing is an option so they do not need light to germinate in fact they don't want light germ to germinate which is why they're planted an inch deep so they don't need to go under lights until you start seeing sprouts coming through the soil then you get them under lights now i am not going to thin these seedlings out this whole thing will get planted out and if i were planting these in four inch pots same thing i would leave those three seedlings all in that pot and plant them out as one rather than trying to separate those when these get to be about six inches tall you're going to want to pinch them back i usually pinch them back to about two sets of leaves and then you'll get some branching going on so that will help bulk them up you'll have more flower stems so that you will have more flowers because that's what we want out of these right you can plant these out in your garden before your last frost date because like i said they can handle a bit of frost so usually you want to see how you can get your soil worked and then if your soil feels icy cold i mean that's too soon but it can go out earlier than some flowers can these grow really quickly though so don't don't push these too early in fact i am starting these about two weeks earlier than i normally would just so that i can make this video to be applicable to the most number of people who are out there trying to start these this year so you do want to prepare the soil before you plant these out and that's going to be working in a good amount of well-aged manure or homemade compost because you want a really nice rich soil but you don't want it bad drainage bad drainage will not treat these well either so make sure you have good drainage but also work in a lot of organic material for these to feed off of and also to keep their roots cool and moist you're also going to need to provide something for these vines to climb up so i just use bamboo canes but you could use netting or a fence or some sort of mesh whatever system you like if you use bamboo canes when you plant them out you want to tie them in just to keep them pointed in the right direction after they get about a foot tall they sort of become self-supporting because they have tendrils that will hang on to each other and onto the canes so they'll sort of do their own thing but you do have to keep them going in the right direction or else they'll flop now there are a couple of enemies of sweet peas mainly slugs and rabbits in my experience so by keeping those vines going upright the slug damage is limited if you let them sort of lay over on the soil you can have an issue with slugs if that's a problem where you are and rabbits will eat them particularly when they're young i feel like later on they don't seem to care as much although you never know with a rabbit but you do want to protect the base of these from rabbits because they can do a lot of damage on these you can grow sweet peas in pots a bigger pot will be better so that you'll have plenty of soil volume in there and you'll keep those roots a little bit cooler but no matter where you're growing these you're going to want to fertilize and you're going to want to water you want these to have really consistent water don't let them dry out that'll be the that'll be pretty much the end of them in terms of fertilizing you're going to want to fertilize the seedlings once you get maybe like like two leaves on there i i don't have firm rules for these things i just kind of go with it but you're going to want to give these a dilute fertilizer i always say that i like a fish fertilizer or seaweed fertilizer something like that just to give them a little bit of nutrition i would say feed them when they're seedlings feed them maybe every two weeks or so and same once you get them in the ground you're going to want to feed these throughout the season preferably with some sort of kind of mild organic feed and then the best part about sweet peas is that in order to grow them well it is compulsory that you pick them and i'm not kidding about that as soon as sweet peas start going into seed production mode they stop flowering or flowering really falls off so you prevent that by continuing to pick these and so what i end up with in summer is little little posies of flowers because i'll go out you know at least once a week you want to pick them but it's probably more like every three days i will go out there and just pick all the flowers and then i bring them in and i make a little bouquet and i assure you if you have never smelled the scent of a sweet pea i think you would be hard-pressed to find too many other flowers that smell better and it makes your whole house smell great so a quick note about varieties i'm not going to get into a lot of the variations of varieties there are old-fashioned varieties which often have better scent and then there's spencer varieties which were really developed for larger flowers and longer stems often used for cut flowers or exhibition i grow a little bit of everything honestly all i care about is just having sweet peas so it doesn't matter to me too much how they look i just want them to have that scent and be beautiful and i buy individual varieties because i like to have a variety of colors and then i plant all the hot colors together and the cool colors together and play with it that way but you will often find sweet peas sold in sort of a collection so it'll be a pastel collection or a bright colored collection so if you're not fussy about the specific variety buying a collection there's nothing wrong with that um they'll have some great varieties in there and then it'll just be a little bit of a surprise of what comes up exactly what comes up um because i'm growing so many different varieties i don't even know how many i'll just put a list in the description for you in case you're curious about what varieties i'm growing this year if you're interested in finding out more about the different varieties of sweet peas i'm going to put a link to a video in which it's a lecture given by a sweet pea breeder who really discusses the differences in the different kinds which might be helpful to you but like i said i'm just happy if i have sweet peas so that's it i mean really there isn't that much to it remember you want to keep them cool they want sun they want a lot of food they want moist roots and then remember to pick them all the time that's the basic rules of sweet peas so leave a comment let me know if you're planning on growing sweet peas this year and then make sure you like and subscribe because of course we'll plant these out and you guys will see these throughout the summer so you can see how these exact sweet peas look in i don't know maybe five months or so or have a great day in your garden bye

Channel: The Impatient Gardener

Views: 81,168

Keywords: sweet peas, how to grow sweet peas, vines, flowers, scented flowers, gardening, garden, beginning gardening, grow from seed, seeds, gardens, flower gardening

Id: wgTxO2FtZdc

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021