Follow-up is one of the perks, and advantages, bloggers have over print media. On January 20, 2009, I wrote about planting sweet peas. Now, on July 29, I'm showing you how they turned out. Links will forever keep the sweet pea articles connected – more in-depth info – I love it!
My husband Leroy’s wonderful fish sculpture was a shoe-in as a climbing structure for the ‘Orange Streamer’ sweet peas. For the other varieties planted, I fully intended to put up the traditional netted poles, once the new plants grew some length. Lazy bones (me) never got around to it.
My guilty gardener thoughts vanished when I spotted these three tutuers in a pile in the back yard. (The one on the left starred in a bouquet in my CC post – the other two are usually in pots.) I simply placed the tuteurs side by side over the planted row of sweet peas.
The pea plants loved climbing the structures and I enjoyed the training and twining.
The tuteurs gave the sweet peas a natural, rather than utilitarian, feel in the garden. I think I'll use them again next year, they're much easier than poles.
The seeds didn’t all germinate at the same time– some took weeks. I was a little worried, but most eventually showed up for the party.
The Rating Game
PAINTED LADY
‘Painted Lady’ is lovely and bloomed first, however here aren’t many flowers on a stem and they only last a day in a vase.
LILAC RIPPLE
My old stand-by favorite didn’t germinate fully, and there weren’t that many seeds to begin with, but it kept on blooming and I harvested plenty.
ROYAL WHITE
I picked armloads of these beauties and they looked great combined with 'Lilac Ripple'.
BLUE STREAMER & ORANGE STREAMER
Maybe two seeds of ‘Blue’ germinated and I didn’t care much for the blooms– a bit stark looking, if that’s possible.
‘Orange Streamer’, however was, as my daughter Oneita would say, “Ab fab.”
You've probably heard that harvesting encourages more bloom. It's so true. I’d pick everything pickable one day, and the next day there’d be more. It went on like that for weeks.
