How I Grow Sweet Peas | Seeding, Planting, Fertilizing, Cutting

Hello everyone and welcome back to Crowley House Flower Farm. Today we're going to be talking all about growing the magical sweet pea. So sweet peas are one of those flowers that in the garden can be a challenge for some people to grow and then other folks are like I don't know what you're talking about. So I thought I would delve into growing beautiful sweet peas because we do a lot of that here on the farm and sweet peas are the very first crop if you were to ever follow me from the beginning. It was the very first crop that I grew and it was one that did in the fall fail which I didn't understand sweet peas at all. I just threw them in the ground. There was like a six foot row and it was just one of those things that I had no idea what I was doing. I've always looked at farming or growing or gardening or anything like that is my classroom and this is how I've learned over the I think it's been 15 years now that I've been doing this and so we've kind of gotten a really good grip on growing a sweet peas. That being said over the years you can have you can be the best grower there is and have a complete fail. That has happened to so many growers that I've known that have been doing it way longer than me. So if you do fail it's not the end of the world. You just pick yourself back up and you do it again next year and you will have eventual success. Anyways I'm gonna take you through some of the points. We did get some sweet peas in the other day and I wanted to run through some of them that were growing here on the farm and then some that have come in as well. Okay so we are gonna head on out to the greenhouse because it's warmer although it is kind of warm today here on the farm a little drizzly rainy but I'm gonna tuck myself into the greenhouse and go ahead and run through those seeds with you and then show you kind of what we've done as far as planting and all the things. I'm just gonna give you a deep dive into growing beautiful sweet peas. So you can see behind me we have some sweet peas that we planted back in fall. These have the cattle panel trellising. They are trellised a little over six feet and so and the sweet peas will top these in the greenhouse. When you're growing in an indoor environment you will find that growing sweet peas are a lot different than growing out in your garden. One of the reasons is because this is a controlled environment. We have heat, we have shelter, there's I mean we do have fans oscillating around so we do get some wind. We open up the doors. It's just kind of like I can control this environment where if you're outside you can't. February is the time that we plant for outdoor sowing and we plant them under shelter to get them going. Some people will plant them directly and you can do that. I find that I get the sweet peas to be much more vigorous and beautiful if I can start them indoors this time of year. Now the sweet peas that you've seen on this trellis here have been started back at the end of September 1st of October. We got them started in just little cell packs. We ended up growing them and then pinching them out, planting them out and we've kind of nurtured them along. A lot of times when you're growing inside they won't really do anything. They just kind of stay stagnant but as soon as the sun starts to come back and the days start to get longer and warmer all of a sudden you'll see them just kind of shoot up. As you can see here they've just started growing and it literally is February 17th. Beautiful. They are looking really good. I will tell you how to plant so that you get beautiful starts like this here later on in the video but I wanted to just run through kind of our fertilizing technique that we do now. So one time a week we use a fish emulsion and we mix it up in a bucket. You can kind of see the bucket way down there and we put a couple capfuls in. We fill that bucket up with water and then we drench these so we kind of like it's a weak fertilizer but we just kind of go along the top and we just kind of run the water along it. We do that every single week and right now it's Keith's job so normally I do it but I've been out sick and so Keith has been doing it for me which is really nice because it is kind of you know when you're not feeling good things you know get heavier than they normally are and you just kind of get out of breath because my lungs were kind of weird and you know all those things so but that's what makes that spur on. There is a lot of care to growing sweet peas at least for us here in the greenhouse because they are so vigorous. So we use like a baling twine to twine up every single Monday and sometimes when they're going real gangbusters we will have to do a second twining or at least a section of it so sometimes you'll find that one type of sweet pea will grow better than another. So okay let's get up close and personal to these sweet peas and I will kind of tell you how we got them into the ground. So these here are King Ransom's sweet peas that I seed that I collected over the last year until we've got a little bit of weeds going on here. I just need to get in here and weed out a little bit. It's kind of a chore that's ongoing throughout the year but you can see how beautiful these are and they're already trying I mean in a week or so I'm gonna have to go ahead and get them up. Probably my first baling twine. You can also just kind of feed around here they have these little tendrils that kind of grow. Isn't that fun? They're so pretty you know you can use these as foliage as well. We sell a lot of sweet peas for foliage just in the spring without the flower on it. People love it for you know designing and stuff just because they do have those really fun little tendrils on them. But these are going really really well. I've got to get in here and weed a little bit but you can tell we have them spaced out every four inches and they're on the either side of the cattle panel. We also have a drip tape that runs either side of our so one on each side of our sweet peas and then we have the t-post here in the center. Now this is a tall t-post and it is so we have them every six feet and going every other panel so zigzagged. These will literally topple over the edge of the cattle panels and we have to get ladders out to cut them and to harvest them. Now to get those beautiful blooms that are super tall and just amazing they require a lot of fertilizer. They actually have a long tap root and that's one reason that some people have a hard time growing them is because the container that you grow one needs to be a little bit taller and you have to be a little bit more careful when you're removing them from the pot because they do have that tap root and once you disturb that very long it's that first tap root that comes down kind of like a carrot you know you think about that that very first it doesn't look like a carrot but it's that very first long root that comes down and then you have lots of other little roots that come off the side of it that is the tap root and some plants have them and when you disturb the end nick the end or bruise it or damage it a lot of times that plant will die so it's a good thing to over seed some of your sweet peas and then just be very mindful when you're teasing it out of the container because they have that long tap root you will find before back in fall when we got this bed ready we dug actually a trench first put some compost in and some fertilizer so that when that tap root did hit that spot then it gives that full vigor and you can tell that it's just now starting to hit that because it takes a long time for it to kind of get to that stage we make that trench of fertilizer and compost about 12 plus inches below where we're actually planting the little seedlings it just gives it that burst of energy it needs to really grow up and to give us those long stems and beautiful blooms you do have to pinch sweet peas so when they become they're just a little seedling they're in their little pot and they start to have that long first shoot and maybe another one you take that very first shoot and you cut it down to the first set of leaves don't be afraid to do this it's not going to hurt anything if you did it wrong or pinched off too much as long as you have a leaf there you are good to go what that does is increase the amount of blooms you're going to get and creates that fuller vine and just an amazing plant it's worth doing for sure now i have to say if you don't do that because we do have some that randomly seed out in the garden and they look amazing because they just kind of ramble where they will and i won't pinch those because i don't know they're there and they still put on an amazing show it's just not production worthy so we really encourage um pinching if you have you know a big spot like a vining uh trellis or something like that in your garden pinch them back and you will just have an amazing show keep the fertilize coming don't over fertilize though um because then you'll just get a whole bunch of greenery and no blooms or very little blooms so so just kind of read the instructions read the packages do a little bit of research there are some really good books out there and uh really good growers of sweet peas that have a lot of information that they can share for on their website and things like that now i like to grow um sweet peas from and i get most of my seeds from enchanted sweet peas she sends this beautiful um well-written simple instructions for you she has her sweet peas or she recommends that sweet peas be planted every six inches which ours are a little bit closer than that they might be six inches i don't think so well maybe if you count the whole i guess so most of the time i get the spencer varieties which they came about in about the 1900s in england they have a very nice large flower and very roughly and they put on quite the show that everybody kind of admires when they come to sweet peas and i think it's one of those flowers that everyone has a memory of a grandma or an aunt or somewhere that you've seen it in a garden that you're just like yes please that smell just takes you back it's incredible anyways her little paper has instructions on how to start them and different things like that you can start them in the wet paper towel method which is really easy you just have to make sure that the paper towel stays nice and moist and then um you'll see the little seeds start to kind of pop out and look beautiful um and that happens really fast especially if you start them indoors now the other thing to think about is that you can also grow these in containers so if you had like an obelisk or something like that that you could put down into your container that they could grow up beautiful we've done that before out in the middle garden and we have those beautiful trellises coming up and we have done some sweet peas in there and they come back every year because i forget and then they drop seed and you know they just love it there so then they they do their best they just repeat blooming every single year okay so she does have like growing instructions and everything like that i love she always includes like a handwritten note which is really fun so what i bought from her is charlie's angel um i got william and katherine white frills heaven's scent and southern born which i don't know that one southern born which is a pink shell i don't know i'll have to pull a picture of that one in and just jenny which is a dark purple heaven's scent a light peach white frills that's one that we grow a lot of here in the greenhouse along with jilly which is a cream and then salmon pink which is always a fun one for weddings and then a periwinkle blue which is my favorite which is charlie's angel i'm mainly growing these for seed so um just so i can have my own stock i do i did collect seed off of some of our stuff that we grew last year which was mainly the king ransoms and i have some seed of that i believe it's gonna be what i have and it might not be you know because i have some up on our shopify but you might get a mix of um king ransoms and one of these other ones just because i did collect them all from the king ransom area but i had other stuff grown in this long row so it's really hard to kind of keep track of everything so if you might get a mix of you know like a salmon pink and king ransom which wouldn't be bad because that'd be really pretty okay i'm going to show you some of the king ransoms that i started which are going to be grown outdoors for seed this year and i started them all like monte don does and i saw that and i thought it was really cool so i thought i would just give it a go and see how it comes so here is our king ransoms they have come up beautiful i put three seeds in a four inch pot and you can tell they're starting to kind of come through the bottom here so i'm going to pop them up but you can tell that they've all germinated really good i wasn't sure how they do now i keep if you're wondering these little things over the top these are just like rowing trays partly because birds tend to eat these when they're at this juicy dender stage and so also mice like them so a lot of times we'll put something heavy over the top of them yeah they're coming up really really nicely and they'll be ready to put out here shortly after what we're going to look for is a longer stem and then we're going to pinch them back and they're going to be ready for putting outside okay so i did get another pack of seeds which is just a mix and this is a spencer ripple formula mix and i got this one from johnny seed as you guys know they're one of my favorites to order from but this one had 50 seeds in the pack where the other company enchanted sweet peas um they come in 50 now which is really nice for flower farmers or people that want to grow en masse or if you're planting up like um just a fence row or something like that you need more than you know 10 seeds the other seeds are just in these small little packs like this and they come in 10 of them for like 5.95 i want to say so kind of expensive it's almost what little over 50 cents a seed um which johnny's this was a lot less for 50 seats which is kind of cool so the the 50 here are just for the gardens i thought that would be kind of fun to do like a little mix that's going to go around a lot of times we've done like this tunnel that you can walk through and we call it like a rainbow tunnel and emma's done that a couple years when she was working for us and it turned out really cute people love to take photos with it so i kind of want to recreate that we'll see if i can do something like that again this year but i thought it would be kind of fun just to have this like a mass amount of beautiful sweet peas going down so i'm going to talk to you about planting your seeds so this is one way to start your seed and it is when you just have a little bit of water and you put your seed right in and you let it soak usually overnight in my case i'm just gonna let them soak until the end of the day and then i'm gonna go ahead and pop them back up the other way is the paper towel method um sometimes i'll do it this is just like a snack size a ziploc bag and i've just taken a wet paper towel and i am folding it in half so i'm just gonna lay this out and put my seeds in it almost like a little burrito so i've just made a little pocket there like that and then this one is white frills so i'm gonna take that and i'm just gonna put my seeds in there like that and you could probably tape this to the outside if you wanted to i'm just gonna kind of pop it in on the side like that it kind of comes with a little paper on it but you can just kind of lay them out like that and then we're just gonna gently kind of fold them in on themselves and there you have it and then in a couple days you're gonna see those starting to sprout the reason to do um both of these methods work really really well but the reason to do them like this in this bag here is if you were to collect your own seed and you weren't sure of the germination rate that would allow you to know that you know the seed that you're putting in is viable it's already starting to sprout you can see it great the other way that we do it which is just in this little container here is to soften the seed now you can chit which is to like score the top of one just to get the outer hard shell to crack sometimes seeds like sunflowers and things like that have that harder outer shell and so what you're trying to do is just trying to soften it to give it the best chance to actually break and then to germinate so that's the reason we're doing that a lot of times for a flower farmer we're going to be seeding up in a 50 cell tray let me show you what that is so this is when we're doing a mass amount we will just seed them up into these 50 cell trays this is a whole stack like this and they just allow for a little bit nicer plug to actually plug into the ground it does have a hole on the bottom and what i find is that tap root sometimes will come out the bottom there totally fine you just have to be really gentle when you're pulling these out it is nice to just be able to use this hole to gently kind of squish it and then kind of push it up you can use like a pencil or something like that if the tap roots not kind of poking through the other way to do it would be to use like something to kind of go down the side of it if it's stuck and just kind of gently pull it out but when you're seeding up hundreds of these trays and you're doing tons of sweet peas if you lose a it's not a big deal home gardener i kind of like these six cell trays where you can grow six and i would do a couple sweet peas per little tray and then just be able to set that out in the garden the monte don method the one he used he used one of these four inch little pots and he put three seeds in and he said he's done that for years and it's always worked really well what i do like about these is that and the six packs they're a little bit longer they are deeper so that allows that tap root to not be as disturbed when they're ready to go ahead and put it out into the garden now another method that is really kind of cool is you can take divisions of sweet peas by taking the little cuttings that you tip off you know when you cut down your sweet peas and you can put them in a jar of water in a warm location and pretty soon you're going to see little roots coming out the bottom of that sweet pea cutting and that is something that you can then in turn pot on grow on and then plant out into the garden which is really really cool so i'm gonna do some of that today actually and see how it turns out because i've only heard about it and never done it so um it'd be kind of fun you guys hear the frogs in the background it's raining today and that you know it's warm and it's that perfect condition for them to start waking up january and february is the time that they start to mate here in the pacific northwest so we'll get hundreds of them across the roads and when this you know it's just starting to be um deafening at night just the thousands of frogs out which is really cool so i'm gonna go take some cuttings and kind of show you what that looks like so this one here that i want to take some cuttings from and try this method that i've heard about is called april in paris this is a one that is sought after for floral design and it's that beautiful color of lavender and creamy which is just perfect for weddings so what i'm gonna do is i've got just a little jar this is like a little jelly jar i've written april in paris on my tag and i have some water in here so i'm gonna take some clean cutters and we're just gonna take some of these tips off and put them in the water and see what happens now a friend of mine did this and she said it worked perfectly we are going to use a little bit of rooting hormone but what i'm gonna do is go ahead and take my cutting here so i just kind of pinched off some of those leaves and i'm going to just go stick it in rooting hormone and then put it in the water i'm going to stick it in water for now just to see so i have my cuttings here and i've taken off the lower leaves basically what that looks like is here at the end of this tip i'm just pulling off this is where the roots will form so anytime you're trying to propagate anything you have to have kind of like a node i mean not everything so if we're doing like hardwood cuttings or um things like you know arborvita and all that kind of stuff it's a little bit different than when we're doing something like this so what i'm gonna do is i have some rooting hormone and this is the lightest rooting hormone there's like one two and three three would be used things for like ever like if we're doing evergreens and things like that but number one is for most most everything that like any gardener would be doing for home gardening but so i've got it cleaned up and then i've got my rooting hormone here it's just a powder i think it comes in a liquid as well but i've always used the powder because so i'm just gonna give it a little tap i've got it nicely covered and then you're actually gonna stick it back in water this is what i've seen so i don't know if it's gonna work but we're gonna check it out together later this week i'm gonna come back and revisit this and hopefully by the end of this video we will see new roots if it actually works we'll see okay got my little jar done now all i have to do it is put it in somewhere warm and sunny so i'm just gonna pop it into the house into on one of the window seals and see how it does we're gonna look for little roots to appear down here in a couple days apparently is what they say i don't know so at the end of the week i'm gonna check them and see if we have anything this would be if it works this would be a really cool way to just be able to buy you know one package of seed get it going and then that first little pinch that you're doing taking those pinches doing this method growing them on and i think it will work out perfectly the only thing about these these are older we planted these back in the fall so i'm not sure if this is the wrong stage to take the cuttings and if it's that new growth that's pretty tender still that we would be taking cuttings and having much more luck so if it doesn't work this time i'm gonna try it again after the ones i'm seeding today when i have that first initial cut once your sweet peas start to bloom and you start to cut the first blooms that come on for most of the varieties have really long stems ours can be over two feet in length which is amazing and then you have this beautiful stem with a long just roughly beautiful sweet smelling sweet pea at the end of it and those we can use for putting in bouquets and weddings and things like that florists love them we can sell a ton of them we bunch them if they are just the stem we bunch them in 15 stems and we sell them off or if we're cutting on the vine so it's got the vine so later on in as the season progresses your sweet peas get shorter and shorter but it's a way to be able to sell them with a big stem length on them is to be able to cut the foliage as well so we'll again cut pretty deep into our beautiful sweet peas and sell them on the vine which actually you can get a little bit more money for and those we bunch in 10 stem bunches if you have any more questions about growing beautiful sweet peas let me know in the comments below also let me know what varieties you're growing this year if you've always struggled growing or anything like that let me know if you have any challenges that you kind of run into with growing anything in the spring i know for us we tend to get slugs and birds and mice love sweet peas so we're trying to do our best repelling them with slug bait or like the little iridescent um it's like tape you can also put up things that deter birds mice we find that they don't go after them too much we just have to grow them on a little bit longer in a sheltered area and by using something like this over the top of them and sometimes we'll even wait it down with a terracotta pot on top we have cats so we don't really have a problem with mice anymore but if you did you would want a grid that's a little bit smaller than this to get your sweet peas going and then you would want to wait it down with a terracotta pot i know a lot of farmers use that method and you could use that as a home gardener as well all right guys i hope you enjoyed that video and i encourage you to start some sweet because because they are so rewarding when they do emerge from the garden and just oh that smell there's nothing better in the spring garden than a sweet pea i hope this inspired you to head on out grab some sweet pea seeds and get them in the ground for a beautiful spring show and oh i'm so excited for you you have no idea all right guys until next time much success in all you do and grow and we'll be seeing you shortly back here at crowley house flower farm nursery very soon bye-bye so so far my experiment has not worked my little roots have not sent out little shoots yet um so i'm gonna have to check back in with that later but yeah let me know if you've ever tried this before or any tricks on it because a friend of mine did it and she had like tons of root about a week later it's only been about five days so i just haven't seen anything at all so we'll see okay so this would be the sewing method where you would take a paper towel and get them started i did this a couple days ago so we're just gonna check together oh yep sweet peas are one of those that are really easy easy to start you can see i don't know if i can get up well maybe i'll pull one out you see the little start there just kind of poking through so that's what this does is just kind of keeps the moisture it's not sopping wet it's just moist enough so almost all of them i think there's one two two that haven't started so i'm just gonna leave them in there until they are ready to go