Here they are, sweet peas grown in plugs – terrific root development – look at that, absolutely super! They’re going to get to a metre and a half plus, I would think.

So the compost has been dug-in, and I’ve made a wigwam out of old bamboo canes. They’re plenty tall enough, as you can see they go well above the top of the fence, which is 2 metres. I’m going to plant 2 plants to each bamboo cane. There are 6 in there, so that’s a dozen plants.

Okay, so I’m holding the sweet pea plug a little awkwardly because I want to show you how deep you plant them. It’s quite difficult once they’re in the soil.

If you imagine that the finger that I’m touching with my thumb is the soil level when you finished planting. That’s about as shallow, I emphasize shallow, as you want to plant them in the soil. If I go a little higher, like this, so that’s fine.

Sweet peas will make roots along the stems that have been buried, which will speed up their growth and make them more resistant to drought.

Although it’s just been raining very hard indeed, so that isn’t a thought at the front of anybody’s minds, and you’ll get more flowers out of the sweet peas if you do it that way. This also notice, has been stopped, you can see where the second shoot has come out at the bottom. I’m quite tempted to take them back to probably where that thumb is and up to about there.

Just to make sure that there aren’t any little baby flower buds lurking somewhere in the tips because I want plenty of growth before it breaks into flower.

Hopefully you can see that it’s actually quite deep. There’s the soil level where my spade is, so the soil is going to come up to there when they’ve been planted, and I’m going to shorten the side growths. So ideally I’ll make sure I leave some leaves above the ground for the plant to breathe and work out which way it needs to grow.

The first one has been planted and looking at it more closely, you can quite clearly see there’s a flower bud forming in this tip here. So I’m going to take that off like that. It’s been cut back and should grow nicely from there. So they’re all planted – there they are, snuggled up and cut back – just the tops taken off just to make sure we don’t get flowers too soon. The leaky hose looks as though it’s being planted as well – don’t think we’ll need that today or tomorrow, as the ground is very wet.

With a bit of luck they’re going to get up to there I hope, over the course of the next 6 weeks or so and will be flowering as they go.