Snap peas are the kind with the thick, sweet, crunchy, juicy edible pods (not the thin edible pods – those are snow peas or sugar peas). There are a number of different varieties available, though many people call them by the name of the original commercial variety, Sugar Snap
Sugar Snap is a tall climbing or vining pea, and it needs a trellis, fence or strings to climb up. In my garden it will happily grow to 9 feet tall! Since I’m short and I don’t like having to pick my peas off a ladder, I clip them off once they reach about 6 feet.
Several other varieties of snap peas grow as shorter vines, 24 – 36″ tall. You’ll sometimes see them decribed as “bush” varieties but they are really short vines, and in my experience they still need some support. If you leave them to just grow on their own they will flop over eventually, especially if you have any wind in your garden. Bush varieties include Sugar Lace, Sugar Ann, and Sugar Daddy.
The big advantage of snap peas over regular shelling peas is that you get a lot more food off each plant, because you’re eating those thick, juicy pods as well as the peas inside.
Like all peas, snap peas like cool weather. When you plant them depends on your climate: if you’re in a cold-winter area where the ground freezes, plant in spring once the ground thaws and up to 2 months before your last frost date. In a mild winter climate you can sometimes get away with planting in fall and allowing the small plants to winter over, maybe with some protection. Here in the Pacific Northwest I plant my earliest batch in mid-February – not always successfully! – and then plant several more batches in mid-March, April, and even May in a shady spot. You can also grow peas in the fall, in theory anyway, but its a challenge getting them started in the end-of-summer heat so they will be ready to grow on and crop in the cooler fall weather. Temporary shading can help. In general, peas don’t mind some shade and will grow just fine in anything from part shade to full sun.
A fine seedbed and high fertility are not required. Peas are big seeds and have sturdy roots and stems, and they can deal with quite rough ground as long as it’s broken up a bit and weeds removed. They also fix nitrogen from the air as long as the friendly bacteria they use are present in the soil. If you’ve grown peas before in the spot you plan to use, the bacteria are probably already present, but you can use “garden inoculant”, a black powder sold where you buy your seeds, to supply them. Read the package and made sure the kind you’re buying is the right kind for peas, as there are different strains of bacteria for different legumes.
How much to plant? Depends whether you are growing to freeze as well as eat fresh, and how many people will be eating them. As a starting point for your calculations, I reckon to get 1lb of pods total over the harvest period, per foot of 3′ wide bed off Sugar Snap climbing peas. That’s with two 6″ wide bands of plants running along the bed, seeds sown about 2″ apart both ways in the band. You can see how that looks in the bed on the left, with the plants 4-6″ high. The harvest period for me is about 3-4 weeks. If you don’t want a whole lot at once, try several 3′ x 6′ patches planted at intervals of 2-4 weeks through the spring, to give you a continuous supply.
Snap peas need support.
Short vines like Sugar Ann, Sugar Daddy, Mega or Sugar Lace can make do with “pea sticks” – these are twiggy branches 2-4 ft long, pushed into the ground between the plants for them to cling to with their tendrils. Don’t wait too long to do this! The ideal time is when the seeds have come up and the plants are an inch or two high, but haven’t started to cling to each other.
Climbing snap peas are tall but not terribly heavy. They do cling to strings with their tendrils but I find they don’t cling tightly enough to stay up reliably – I run strings along the row at several heights as the vines climb, to hold them back against their supports. My own support structure consists of cedar 1×2 A-frames across the beds every 4 feet, joined by cedar 1×1 or 1×2’s at top and bottom of the frames running along the bed which have nails in, then strings run up and down between the nails. (This all-purpose structure works for beans, tomatoes and squash too).
In this picture the strings are wrapped around the top and bottom bars, but nails work much better – it’s faster and easier to run the strings in the first place, then to pull them off to compost, vines and all, at the end of the season.
What else can I tell you about growing snap peas… oh yes, pests and diseases!
Slugs and snails can cut the seedlings off as they come through. The best defence I’ve found is a copper strip round the whole bed, but you can use whatever normally works against slugs and snails in your area.
Birds are the most damaging pest in my garden. The first 2 years, no trouble at all. The third year: birds discovered the seedlings and pulled out all except two in an entire 20′ x 3′ bed! I replanted, and this time covered the bed with chicken wire to keep the birds off. That worked (garden fleece like Reemay works too), but you have to be careful of two things – one, that the birds can’t get under the netting at any point, and two, that you take the netting off before the peas have grown through it and started clinging together with their tendrils. In that case you have to leave the netting on the whole season, it’s hard to weed between the peas, the peas and weeds get tangled up in the netting and it’s a big mess to get it off at the end.
The only other problem I’ve had is powdery mildew which develops at the end of the harvest season in the summer heat. If it wasn’t for the mildew the peas would set a whole new crop of flowers and pods, but once the mildew takes a good hold the new pods are not fit to eat.
Other than that, snap peas and any other peas (I grow snow peas, shelling peas and soup peas for drying, too) are easy to grow, yummy to eat and altogether very satisfying.
