Sweet Pea

Every year, sometime in February, I have a little ritual that keeps me going until spring. I start seeds in my sunroom – always sweet peas to plant on my trellis.

There is something special about placing the little seeds in the peat moss in the cardboard pods that makes me feel like everything is going to be alright.


My sunroom, where the plants spend their beginning days, faces south and is all windows, and the best part is it has a stone floor with radiant heat. So it is a perfect spot for incubating seedlings. Within a few days, they start to sprout and within a couple of weeks the vines grow to several inches long. Amazing. The miracle of life never fails to astonish me - Think of all the DNA and information in that tiny seed.



After a couple of months, the plants get moved outside to a cold frame for a few weeks until they get planted in the ground along the trellis. Being cold weather plants, the sweet peas are among the first plants you can sow outside.

Some day, maybe I will have a proper greenhouse to plant and work in all year but for now, my sunroom and coldframe work just fine.

It is still too early for me to start my seedlings but it is not too early to start thinking about it. Last fall, I took some pods from my neighbor Marie’s plants – she calls hers ‘beach peas’ because they seem to grow wild in her yard. They are more hardy than my hothouse sweet peas but look the same. I am waiting to see if those beach peas come up on their own in my garden this spring. One can only hope!