Trellising Sugar Snap Peas

I am convinced that sugar snap peas are the closest thing to candy that a green vegetable can get.  Benjamin is pretty particular about 'green' things that he eats and he eats sugar snap peas like Skittles.  They can be eaten raw right from the garden or stir fried or steamed with butter.  We harvest them, blanch them and freeze them and enjoy them all year long.  This year I doubled up and planted two 24 foot rows since we ran out of them prematurely this fall. 

I staggered the two plantings by a couple of weeks to extend the harvest.  The photo below shows the latest ones I planted.  If you'd stretch them out, they're about 8 inches tall now.  But they are falling all over the place.  They need a trellis to grow on as they are extending tendrils and want to climb.


Young Sugar Snap Peas eager to climb

The photo below shows the earliest ones I planted.  You can see that they are healthy, some of them are starting to bloom and some of them have climbed almost to the top of the 4 foot tall cattle panel I'm using for a trellis.  Once they reach the top, they'll keep growing and fall over making the harvesting process hard.  Last year I extended the trellis an additional 4 feet taller by wiring some additional rods to the T-posts and then ran baling twine from end to end for the peas to continue growing on.  It worked okay, but I learned that I really needed something stronger than string for them to grow on.  

Peas shooting on up the trellis

For my second row of sugar snap peas, I wanted to experiment.  I looked into just buying another couple of cattle panels and stacking them one on top of the other to make an 8 foot trellis.  This was a little pricey for my budget so I explored other options at the local hardware store and came up with this alternative to try.  I purchased a mat of reinforcement wire mesh that is 20 feet long and 8 feet tall.  It was more affordable and almost the dimensions I needed it to be.  My rows are 24 feet long.  I built a 4 foot extension on the end with sticks lashed together for the 4 foot shortfall.  The only thing I'll have to work on is securing the top 4 feet.  As you can see below, it is kind of wobbly.  I'll probably wire another T-post directly above the existing one to provide support.  Once the peas have trellised upward, if I don't have a stable trellis, the wind will likely blow it over. 

I think this will work better.  It is lighter than the cattle panel, but it doesn't need to be a heavy gauge wire to do what I need it to do.  Additionally, I'm going to experiment using this set-up to trellis my heirloom indeterminate tomatoes on in the Spring.  Those tomatoes vine and vine and I always have trouble with them falling over.  I'm hoping that I'll be able to secure them to the wire mesh just like the sugar snap peas.  We'll see how that works out in the Spring...