Planting out the sugar snap peas

We sowed some sugar snap peas, Cascadia, on 26 April and yesterday, these were big enough to plant out.

We constructed a climbing frame for them to grow up out of some old square wire fencing which we stretched across the bed and held in place by tying it to a few stakes, one at either end and one in the middle for extra support. We just used this as we had it lying around, but any type of wire or plastic netting would do providing it can be held up to support it so that the peas can grow up it.

We’d sown two peas per cell as we hadn’t grown these before and weren’t sure what the germination would be like, but turns out almost all of them grew, so fingers crossed we have plenty of peas when it comes to harvest!

We planted each of the peas out close to the wire, and about 4-6 inches apart from one another. We made a hole just larger than the cell that the peas had been growing in with a trowel and carefully placed each plant into the hole, firming soil gently round the base of the plant afterwards to give the plant a bit of stability.

We planted all along one side of the wire, and then went back along the other side, trying to plant the peas between the others we’d already planted on the other side where possible to give them a bit more space to grow.

After we’d finished planting out, we gave the plants a drink of water with some seaweed solution in it. We find this gives the plants a little boost when they’re first planted out.

As we have lots of pigeons in our garden, and the odd rabbit, we then covered the plants with some netting to stop out young pea shoots from being eaten! Hopefully it won’t be long before these are climbing up the wire netting.