How to Grow Sugar Snap Peas

Sew your snap peas at the end of the cold season. Sugar snap peas flourish in cooler temperatures. You can put your seeds in the ground as early as the final frost of winter, just before the onset of spring. Even young plants will be hearty enough to survive one or two minor frosts in the interim.^[1]

• The ideal ground temperature for sugar snap peas is around 45 °F (7 °C), but you're free to begin planting as soon as the soil has thawed enough to dig.
• Due to their preference for temperate conditions, pea plants won't do as well in warm, humid climates.

Find a plot of healthy soil. Set aside an open space in one corner of your garden where the growing snap peas can get plenty of indirect sunlight. The soil you use for planting should be nice and dark, with a high nutrient content. It also needs to be loose enough to encourage proper drainage and runoff after a heavy rain or weekly watering.

• Use a hand aerator or similar tool to punch a series of holes in the topsoil around the pea plant. These openings will ventilate the soil.

Add an inoculant to the soil to promote healthy growth. Extremely cold, nutrient-poor soil may not have the nitrogen that sugar snaps need to grow to a healthy size. You can remedy this by sprinkling a natural inoculant into the soil prior to planting. One of these compounds may also help if you notice your plants are developing at an unusually slow rate.^[2]

• Alternatively, the seeds themselves can be dusted with an inoculant before they go into the ground.^[3]
• Inoculants are purely organic additives that can enhance a struggling plant’s ability to absorb nitrogen from the soil. They can ordinarily be found wherever gardening supplies are sold.

Make sure the peas get enough sunlight. Ideally, your plants should be situated somewhere where they can get about 6 hours of sun exposure per day. However, they’ll also do just fine in partial shade. ^[4]

• Too much sunlight can warm the soil around the plant, resulting in unfavorable growing conditions.
• If you’ve planted your snap peas in a separate container, you’ll have the advantage of being able to move them around to areas with more or less light as needed.