Beautiful Bloomers! (Sweet Pea)

Member Name: KathrynPenguin

Product:	Sweet Pea
Date:	22/01/01 (1901 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Lots of flowers, easy to grow

Disadvantages: You need a net

I'm not a gardener, I've never really been interested in the garden. My mother is mad keen and will spend every day out there in the summer if you let her. My thoughts only turned to my garden last year. I was getting married in July and the photographer told me to make sure the garden looked nice for the pictures. I phoned my mum and asked her to see to it.

Early last year I was in the garden centre with my friend. Knowing that my garden needed prettying up for the wedding I started looking at the plants. For a few pounds I bought some tiny Sweet Pea's. These are a lovely climbing plant which my mother often used to grow and you get loads of blooms which smell great. I thought they would be perfect to grow up the wall where my one flowerbed was.

I took home my little plants and read the tag. Apparently I needed a net or trellis to grow them up. I popped round to B&Q and found they sold "sweet pea" nets. The box was about £4 and came with loads of plastic net (big squares about 4 inches across) and pegs to tether the net into the ground. I measured up the area where I was going to plant and cut the net accordingly, there was enough left to allow me to use a new piece for about the next 10 years! Securing the top of the net was no problem as there was a cable running along the wall (its not mine and I don't know what the cable is for!). I used plant ties to secure the top of the net to the cable and the pegs provided to secure the bottom of the net to the ground.

Around this time I told my mum I'd got some Sweet Peas to plant in my bed. She told me not to expect too much from them as she had experienced limited success. She also said that she had read somewhere that they would only grow as tall as their roots went deep. This made me think they maybe wouldn't do so well as the soil in my garden is solid clay, not easy for the roots to push through. Anyway I'd already bought the plants a
nd attached the net so I figured I might as well plant them.

Once you have planted your Sweat Pea's you need to regularly push them into the net, to encourage them to grow up and cling to the net. Like other climbing plants they put out little feeler shoots that curl themselves around the net. I missed one totally and it grew out across the lawn. The rest I trained successfully up the net. These little climbing plants need plenty of water so they had to be watered pretty much every day. This wasn't too much bother as I needed to water the lawn (mine was the only green lawn in the street last year!).

Once they have climbed nicely they start to bloom. Lots of little flowers which all give off a gorgeous scent. You should pick the blooms every day, to encourage more flowers to grow, if you leave them on the plants you get less flowers. Armed with my scissors I religiously went out every day and picked a huge bunch of flowers which filled my house with colour and scent, they only live for a few days but you get so many flowers this doesn't matter.

My lovely Sweet Peas were in full bloom on my wedding day, presenting a lovely wall of pretty flowers for me to stand in front of, just as I'd hoped for. Of course it rained in the morning and the grass was too wet for me to stand on so they never made it into the pictures. These were lovely plants for me, easy to grow, fairly low maintenance and filled my house with pretty flowers. When they finished blooming I just ripped down the net with the plants still attached and pulled up the plants.

I will be planting Sweet Pea's every year now, they are definitely a good addition to my garden. Oh and my mums warning about them not growing very tall was wrong, mine were well over six feet high! I guess the gardening bug has bitten me and I will one day call myself a gardener.

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