Four Steps to Increase Your Sugar Snap Peas Production

I have a confession to make: I’ve been a semi-lazy gardener this season. I haven’t given my sugar snap peas the attention I normally would, and as a result, my plants haven’t produced as many pea pods as they perhaps should. I wrote in June about trellising your sugar snap peas to increase growth. Fortunately, there are a couple other things you can do, if you have some unproductive vines like mine, to amp up your production.

But first, what are sugar snap peas? If you’ve ever grown them or eaten them, you might have noticed that they’re a combination of snow peas and field peas (like the kind you might have grown up eating). Turns out, a farmer actually bred them that way not all that long ago. He wanted the mange tout quality of snow peas (which basically just means you can eat the whole pod) but the sweetness of field peas. Thus, sugar snap peas were born.

Members of the Fabaceae family, sugar snap peas are best grown in cooler weather. In warmer places like Houston, that means over the winter (October through March). In the Chicago area, I can grow them in the spring and fall, though this year I had some trouble with frost at the beginning of their growing season, shortly after I sowed the seeds right underneath my trellises; and now, the temperatures are so hot that the plants are getting stressed and the leaves are turning brown.  

According to my research, you should expect to get about a fourth of a pound of peas per plant. That means you probably need to grow several plants in order to get a good weekly harvest, something equivalent to what you’d bring home from the grocery store. If you want to get one pound per week of peas from week 8 to week 12 in their growing cycle, you need at least four plants then.

Like I’ve confessed, I haven’t been getting that kind of production this season. So, what can you do to up your pod production?

Step 1: Support your peas with a trellis and use twine to secure them in place.

While I have done that, I can still see tendrils that aren’t attached to the trellis and have stopped growing. Only those vines that stayed attached have kept producing more peas. 

Step 2: Side-dress your pea plants with compost every week.

You don’t want your peas to have too much nitrogen in the soil because then you’ll get lots of leaves and not enough peas. Add some good organic compost over the roots of your pea plants regularly to encourage them to produce more peas. 

Step 3: Pinch off the ends of your vines.

If you want more flowers or more fruit, pinch off vines at any juncture so that the vine will split into two vines. 

Step 4: Keep your vines picked. 

Now let’s see if we can get more production! If you live somewhere the temperatures are currently blazing, keep this guide handy for your cool season. Until then, peas out!