Sweet peas are growing fast and starting to flower. With a few essential tips on growing sweet peas you can keep your sweet peas flowering right thought to October.

The first tip is the more you pick, the more you get. Do not be concerned that if you pick all the blooms there will be no more flowers; quite the reverse if you stop picking the sweet peas they stop producing flowers. Once the plant has produced seeds, which form from the spent flowers, it has fulfilled it's botanical role and will slow down and stop flowering. So to keep it flowering you keep taking off the flowers, (and any seed pods) and it will keep rewarding you with more flowers. Image to the left shows what the seed pods look like. Picking the flowers and removing the seed pods is essential when growing sweet peas.

Equally important when growing sweet peas, is to remove the tendrils which form on the plant, illustrated in the second image. The tendrils look as if they will support the plant, and so there maybe a reluctance to cut them off. Left unchecked the sweet pea tendrils twist and distort the plant, because they hold the sweet pea back. The tendrils are a sort of plant tie in, a marker, which holds the plant and it will then struggle to grow upright and becomes twisted which spoils the lovely straight stems and eventually the plant can become very tangled.

Cut them all off, see the image below which shows just how many can be removed without any harm to the plant, quite the opposite. You may have to tie or support the sweet pea after removing the tendrils.

More tips on growing sweet peas