Spacing – sugar snaps can be planted a little closer together than snow peas although don’t make them closer than 4cm. Frost will usually make the flowers sterile so make sure you sow to avoid this problem. A maximum of 25 and minimum of 5 degrees Celsius is best. These plants thrive in a cool growing environment, temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius greatly lower yields. You don’t have to mind your peas and ques. Remember all legumes have beneficial actions on your soil (they help put nitrogen back into the soil) so don’t limit your pea and bean plantings to your VEG bed but sow them all around the garden for their beautiful flowers and the good soil work they do.
They are an excellent source of iron and vitamin C (although the vitamin C content is reduced greatly by cooking) and very good for your immune system. Snow and sugar snap peas have much less protein than their other leguminous relatives. Sugar Ann (dwarf) – another sugar snap and very sweet but can suffer from powdery mildew where Sugar Bon will not.Sugar Bon (dwarf) – is a sugar snap pea and the most productive in commercial use.Mammoth Melting – can be used for edible leaf harvesting and flowers but requires trellising.NSW agriculture department recommends these: Spanish Sky Scraper – sweet fine flavoured pea, very productive with white flowers.Roi De Carouby – very pretty purple flowers and real climber.Oregon – flat edible bush type, heavy bearing and disease resistant.The snow pea is among the oldest know cultivated vegetables with evidence showing it’s cultivation in the region now know as the Thai-Burma border 12,000 years ago! The sugar snap was invented by an American named Calvin Lamborn in the 1960’s by crossing the snow pea with the regular garden pea. Half of the sugars are said to be gone within one hour of picking, so it can truly be said you have never tasted a snow pea, unless you have picked it yourself. So, as well as being delicious, peas are a great fertility boosting plant in the garden. The Fabaceae family is the third largest family of flowering plants in the world and includes most of those wonderful plants we call legumes – so special and important because they capture precious nitrogen from the air with their biochemical alchemy.