Snap Pea Trellis Trials

Peas can be a bit of a tricky crop. They don’t like it too be too hot, or too cold or too wet or too dry. The Goldilocks zone - where everything is just right and the peas flourish - is very narrow for peas. Oh, and peas are vine crops in that they like to crawl and climb anywhere they can and don’t necessarily stand upright all on their own. That’s especially true for our sugar snap peas. The vines can grow to be 5 to 6 feet tall by the end of their productive season. With that much height it’s a requirement to trellis snap peas to reduce disease pressure, manage the height, and make them easier to pick. This weeks blog post will go over two methods we tried this year.

Method One: Trellis Netting

This method utilized plastic netting suspending by using fence posts, conduit pipe and zip ties to give the peas a nice net to climb up. In our experience this method works the best but it has some down sides. First, it’s a bit labor intensive to setup. It takes a good amount of time and back and forth trips to get all the pieces of this trellis system in place. Another downside is the plastic - the netting is discarded at the end of each season.

Overall though this method works the best when installed properly. As you can see in the photo above the peas are nice and upright climbing up the fence with ample space for us to get in and harvest the peas.

Trellis netting in action supporting sugar snap peas!

Method Two: Trellis Ropes

This method switches out the netting for ropes that get weaved between peas and fence posts. It’s simpler to set up but requires more labor overall since someone needs to add additional rope every 1-2 weeks for the peas to climb on. Our experience indicates this method doens’t work well for us. We noticed a marked increase in the number of peas that are unable to find the rope and thus just flop over onto the ground. Not ideal.

We trialed the rope method this year just to see if we liked it better. We found out that we don’t. A valuable lesson for seasons to come!

Method Two: you can see in the center of the photo how the middle row of peas is flopping to the right. Not ideal!