The sweet pea with its bright colors, ranging from various shades of blue to purple to white, is a typical cottage garden plant. It climbs up to heights of up to two meters and quickly covers bare walls and fences with greenery. Most sweet peas thrive as annuals and can be easily grown from seeds you have collected yourself or purchased commercially.
How to harvest and use vetch seeds?
To harvest vetch seeds, the pods should be fully ripe and open with light pressure. Dry seeds and store them in paper bags, sow them in spring and remove dead ones regularly to encourage abundant flowering.
Fruits and seeds
The sweet vetch forms legumes from the beautiful butterfly flowers, which open at the back and belly seam as they ripen. There are about eight seeds in each pod, which are wingless.
Harvest your own seeds
If you cultivate sweet peas in your garden, you can collect the seeds yourself in autumn and sow them the following spring. It is important that the seeds are harvested when fully ripe. The pod must be able to open with light pressure and release the grains.
Drying and storing seeds
Let the seeds dry on kitchen paper for a few days so that they do not start to rot or mold. Then store it in small paper bags until the next gardening season. Don't forget to label them so that you don't confuse the vetch seeds with the seeds of other plants.
Sowing sweet peas
In spring you can sow the robust sweet peas directly at the planned location in the garden. In humid regions or in areas where there is a risk of late frosts, you should prefer sweet peas indoors:
- Let the hard seeds soak in lukewarm water overnight.
- Place seeds individually, a few centimeters apart, in seed trays filled with potting soil.
- Vetches are dark germinators. For this reason, cover the seeds with soil. A layer of one to two centimeters is enough.
- Moisten with a sprayer and germinate in a bright, but not full sun, place at temperatures of around 15 degrees.
After the ice saints, you can plant the sweet peas directly in the later place in the flower bed.
Seeds cost the plant a lot of energy
During the summer you should regularly remove dead flowers so that the vetch blooms profusely and does not put all its energy into seed formation. In addition, sweet peas seed very heavily and could even become a pest.