Sweet Peas

There’s no need to buy a pricey garden structure when it’s quick and easy to DIY a pea trellis like a garden arch or bamboo support. Peas, as well as sweet peas, can be bush or vining plants with both benefiting from being trellised. It keeps the plants upright and off the ground which promotes healthy growth and reduces the risk of insect and disease issues. Trellising pea plants also makes it easier to harvest the pods, or in the case of sweet peas, the fragrant blooms. Below you’ll find seven easy and effective ideas for DIY pea trellises.

Many gardeners grow sweet peas – aromatic annual vines with lovely varied colored blooms, but there is also a perennial sweet pea vine. Also referred to as everlasting sweet pea, this perennial pea vine is an old fashioned bloomer that will continue to reward you with color year after year. Interested in growing your own everlasting pea vine? Read on to learn all about a sweet pea vine perennial.

You might recall that one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to read one of my unread books every month this year, and to decide whether each one keeps its place on the shelf, or needs to be turned loose to find a new owner. In January I read The Gardener’s Year by Karel Čapek. February’s book was Minding my Peas and Cucumbers, by Kay Sexton – quirky tales of allotment life, it says on the cover. According to my notes it has been on the shelf, unread, since 2011.

With their slender stems and perfumed blooms, sweet peas are a firm favourite for cut flowers.

I have had a disaster this year with my sweet peas sown last Autumn. They didn’t fare too well in the cold greenhouse. I gave them a long root run but probably didn’t give them consistent watering and TLC. So by spring they were thin specimens with lacy leaves eventhough I had pinched them out. Because they didn’t look too good I didn’t feed them up and cosset them but just plonked them in the ground. Well it serves me right and I have a very poor showing at the moment.

I picked a small bunch of sweet pea flowers from the garden today, snipping off their stiff, slim stems with a scissors and shaking the rain from their soft, ruffled petals before bringing them indoors to fill the house with their distinctive scent, a cloud of perfume that never fails to seduce.

Homegrown tomatoes taste heavenly when they are sweet with a hint of tart, acidic flavor. If you want to grow the same, there is a science behind it. Learn the Number One Technique to Produce Sweeter Tomatoes to enjoy a sweet summer harvest!

2 packages frozen phyllo dough tartlet shells 1 small package instant vanilla pudding 1 cup milk ½ cup canned pumpkin or sweet potatoes (pureed) 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice (½ tsp cinnamon, ¼ tsp nutmeg and ¼ tsp ginger) ¹⁄3 cup whipped topping (optional)

I must be selective in the kinds of shrubs and trees I add to my landscape. Very simply: I don’t have the room. Like the village matchmaker, Yente, in Fiddler on the Roof, I match the plant with my landscape, paying particular attention to sun exposure, drainage, and room to grow. I also consider its maintenance requirements, particularly water, fertilizer, pruning, and pests. As a tough-love gardener, I have no tolerance for needy, wimpy plants.

Lens culinaria is said to be the oldest pulse in cultivation, and originated in the Middle East. I have never grown it, but a few catalogs, including Sand Hill Preservation, offer seed of various kinds. It is a cool-season crop, like peas.I smiled to see that the acclaimed restaurateur and cookbook author Yotam Ottolenghi (author of “Plenty” and “Jerusalem”) was in a similarly lentil-mad state this first month of the New Year, according to his latest column in “The Guardian” newspaper.  He calls them “the ultimate comfort food,” and shares two recipes – the hummus-like Crushed Puy Lentils with Tahini and Cumin, and also Lentils with Mushrooms and Preserved Lemon Ragout. (Get out your metric

The evolving rainbow of peas at Peace Seedlings—with more colors to come—got its start with decades of breeding by Alan Kapuler, Dylana’s father, a longtime public-domain plant breeder and the founder of Peace Seeds.(More on him, and on some of the other combined Kapuler treasures, from marigolds and zinnias to edible Andean tubers like oca and yacon, to a rainbow of beautiful beets, is at the end of this story.)“We’re doing a lot of crosses and selecting ourselves now, too,” says Dylana of the work she and partner Mario DiBenedetto continue in collaboration with Alan and his wife, Linda, in Corvallis, Orego

You may recall previous confessionals from Joseph, about his “issues,” shall we say, with gladiolus and hollyhocks. He is the author of books on backyard plant breeding and also rock gardening, among his many botanical interests—and you can enter to win a copy of “Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener” in the comments box at the very bottom of the page.Our interview is another episode of the A Way to Garden annual winter seed series, when I virtually shop the catalogs with various expert friends and get growing advice, too. Browse all the past episodes in the multi-year series.Read along as you listen to the Jan. 15, 2018 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).