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Old October 13, 2013   #1
uno
Tomatovillian™
 
Join Date: Apr 2006
Location: SW Pennsylvania, zone 6a
Posts: 147
Default My experience with dwarf snap peas

First off I wanted to Thank everyone who helped me out with the snap pea advice. I wanted to let everyone know how things went this season.

My problem with mice or voles or whatever was helped greatly by using treated seed and the organic seeds I soaked in ground hot pepper and rosemary and poured the water that the peas soaked in on top of the seeds after they were planted. You may want to put this mixture outside when it is soaking because it really smells.

I had problems with birds eating my seeds so I tied up strips of mylar and that seemed to help a lot, but the birds only seem to eat a portion of the seeds....like 25% where as the mice eat ALL of them. The birds were not deterred at all from eating the seeds even the ones coated with fungicide....even the day after they were planted!

I planted 3 dwarf snap pea varieties, they were Sugar Lace, Sugar Sprint and Cascadia. All three produced good peas and grew well.

Cascadia grew the tallest at over 4 feet for some of the vines, it produced the best quality peas IMO and it was the latest to produce the peas. I was surprised at how big the vines got I thought they would be a lot smaller.

Sugar Lace 2 has the most incredible tendrils of any pea I have ever grown they are like an octopus. It stuck to the trellis perfect. I wish Sugar Snap had tendrils like this! I was happy I grew this variety just to see these tendrils.

Sugar Sprint was the earliest and the heaviest producer. The vines were short. The tallest being about 24-30 inches. The pea pods were pretty small.

All three varieties are good but I decided to go back to Sugar Snap next season. I built some more trellises to add more support making like a cage for the Sugar Snaps.

For me the biggest detractions were that I had to bend over the whole time to pick them and other than Sugar Lace 2 they did not stick to the trellis very well. So that made it even worse because some of the peas were less than a foot off the ground. The pea pods were much smaller than Sugar Snap but Cascadia were closer in size to Sugar Snap than the other two varieties. And the overall yield was way less than Sugar Snap for the amount of seed and space used.

But if you do not want to build supports for the huge Sugar Snap vines and don't mind that the peas require a lot of bending to harvest you may love these varieties. They all produced nice peas and grew well.


So I'm back to Sugar Snaps for next season. But I'm glad I tried the dwarf varieties...I love to grow things and this was fun.

Thanks for all the help everyone!

Jim
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