Sugar Snap Peas - 8 per sq ft? How?

Yolos. I have been using string wrapped around the poles several times for my strap. I am using this for my beans and tomatoes.

yolos wrote:Camprn - you said you have 3/4" straps screwed into the top of the bed. Is this a 3/4" strip of wood or strap of some kind. What is that made of. I am getting ready to plant some Chinese Red and Chinese Green noodle beans and have been considering a set up like you use for your peas. I have been considering a wire across the bed or a strip of wood or a horizontal emt pole.

wood. there is a photo earlier in this thread.

I don't bother with a trellis for peas, although I do for pole beans and cucumbers. I select varieties of peas that are compact growers, like Oregon Sugar Pod II and Sugar Ann snap peas. I plant them 9 per square in blocks, surrounded on the outside with foldable metal fencing. The peas tend to support themselves inside, although the Sugar Ann peas do get a little tall and may slump a little over the fence. I should probably use something taller like the foldable tomato cages I'm using for the fava beans.

Below are the Oregon Sugar Pod II on the left and the more enthusiastic Sugar Anns on the right.

I think I am going to try 8/sq on my sugar snaps, as I have never grown them before and am using squares that will be utilized for a summer hottie (peppers) most likely. Maybe shoot for 10 but my trellis is really designed for 8.

Can't wait..soaking seeds now to plant tomorrow!

You're gonna love them. Plain ol' Sugar Snap peas (nothing fancy) are the ultimate! I don't count my peas.  I plant them in a zig zag about 1-2 inches apart along the trellis.  Then I have space for lettuce or whatever in front of them.

CC

CapeCoddess wrote:You're gonna love them. Plain ol' Sugar Snap peas (nothing fancy) are the ultimate!  I don't count my peas.  I plant them in a zig zag about 1-2 inches apart along the trellis.  Then I have space for lettuce or whatever in front of them.

CC

I can't wait to eat them from my garden! We love love them with the Supremely Spicy hummus by Sabra...or any dip or hummus thing. Yayayayay

Raining, no planting. That's OK, now that the work day starts and ends earlier I hopefully can get stuff planted tomorrow! I still hate DST.....

Question concerning companion planting peas. My trellis is behind one of my SFG boxes. Can I plant peas (e.g., 4 to 8 in a square near the edge of the box) and cucumbers (1 per square further away from the edge of the box) in the same square?  I know peas and cucumbers are companion veggies. My thinking is that by the time the peas are done the cucumbers will be taking hold. Is this too crowded per square? Will I end up with a big mess on my trellis and in those squares? 

Perhaps a simpler alternative is to put up another trellis for the peas on one of the other boxes. I like the string trellis shown earlier on this thread.

I had the same line of thinking as you, and plan on trying it this year. I'm succession planting my cucumbers, so the first of the 4 squares with trellising has no peas but gets the first cucumber planting, the other 3 got peas, and I'll plant a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th cucumber planting every few weeks into those pea squares. When the peas are done I'd recommend cutting the peas at the stem and leaving the roots - you don't want to disturb your cucumber's roots by pulling out the nearby, possibly enmeshed, pea roots. I can see pros and cons to leaving the dead vines on the trellis. Cons: The dead vines will look messy, and will provide more places for cucumber beetles and other pests to hide, and might, depending on your weather, rot or mold instead of drying up. Pros: Less work, provides a habitat for pest predators, might allow more natural attachment of your cucumber to the trellis (lots of pea vines for it to curl its tendrils around.) In the end, my decision may depend on how high my peas grow and how much overlap there is on the trellis between the two plants.

I like this idea of planting cuc's in front of the peas. My peas are just coming up and I was wondering where I was going to plant the cuc's. I took down one trellis so I am down to two so this solves the problem. I also have several tomato stakes ( what I call them) heavy gauge 1/8" wire in the shape of a V about 6 ft. long that I used last year for two cuc's each that worked really well. Just planted two per square and when they came up just stuck the stakes into the MM and instant trellis.

BeetlesPerSqFt wrote:... I'd recommend cutting the peas at the stem and leaving the roots - you don't want to disturb your cucumber's roots by pulling out the nearby, possibly enmeshed, pea roots. ...

That is my thinking as well.

So I guess it comes down to "nothing ventured, nothing gained". I think I'll put up another trellis on another box for other "vertical" crops (melon, squash).

I think that's a really great idea! Once upon a time I put a later planting of green beans in with my sugar snap peas. It worked fine. Maybe I'll do that again this year. Thanks for the idea!

CC

My experience last year growing classic Sugar Snap on a trellis (8' trellis, 8/sq.) was that the foliage canopy of the pea vines was dense and hung at least a foot away from the trellis. One or twice I had to run twine from post to post to pull the vines closer to the trellis netting so they didn't shade out the center half of the bed that had radishes and turnips growing in it. Sugar Snaps are very enthusiastic growers and in my situation, cucumber vines would not have had a chance to compete. Sugar Snaps also produce over a longer time frame than shell peas so don't expect them to be finished and out of the way by the time you want to plant cucumbers.

--Dave

dvelten ... that is really good information. Sounds like it would be better to let the peas have their own trellis. Thanks.

Last year, I put my Swiss Chard in front of my trellised pole beans. That worked well, but my boxes are 18" versus 12" square. And some of the smaller chard did get shaded/choked out for sun by the bean foliage. I would do it again however.

Cucumbers are a much larger plant than chard, not sure how that would end up. Maybe put a smaller plant in with the peas, TD, like romaine or chard, something more upright, not as sprawling?

trolleydriver wrote:Question concerning companion planting peas. My trellis is behind one of my SFG boxes. Can I plant peas (e.g., 4 to 8 in a square near the edge of the box) and cucumbers (1 per square further away from the edge of the box) in the same square?  I know peas and cucumbers are companion veggies. My thinking is that by the time the peas are done the cucumbers will be taking hold. Is this too crowded per square? Will I end up with a big mess on my trellis and in those squares? 

Perhaps a simpler alternative is to put up another trellis for the peas on none of the other boxes. I like the string trellis shown earlier on this thread.

You should be able to succession plant peas and cukes. Peas like the cooler soil and weather and will expire when things heat up so plant them early. Conversely, cukes like warm soil and thrive in the heat, so plant them later in the season.

The question was whether snap peas (not shell peas) and cucumbers can share a trellis successfully (co-planting, not succession planting). My experience is probably not. I was harvesting snap and snow peas through the end of July last year, long after you would want to plant cucumbers. The reason I pulled the vines was they were covered in powdery mildew I couldn't control, not because the summer heat killed them (I garden in New England but last summer was fairly hot and very dry). The PM would have also killed any cukes sharing the trellis.

Pole beans grow entirely differently. They send their leaders up the trellis, tightly winding around the cords of the trellis. They don't leaf out significantly until they top the trellis. Eventually they do produce a lot of foliage but it is retained closer to the trellis than with peas.  One year I tried sharing a trellis between pole beans and a Tromboncino squash. It sort of worked but the beans still dominated the trellis since they got the head start and the squash definitely suffered from the competition.

Interesting, Dave. Let me ask you this; I was planning on putting pole beans and cukes on a trellis. Yes? My bed is about 10 feet long, 18" wide, 12 inches deep of MM.

You could try it, Scorpio Rising. Or if your trellis is actually 10 feet long, maybe alternate a few feet of beans, then a few feet of cucumbers.

I am gonna try it. I don't have anyplace else to put cukes. And I have plenty of trellis. I would think cukes will climb easier than melons, do you agree?

I would agree. Melon laves tend to be a lot larger than cucumber leaves.