Welcome to another Q&A with me Sarah Raven and Josie Lewis, our head gardener. And this month,

which is April, we've had some really great questions sent in. So I'm going to start with the first one,

which is how far apart do you plant sweet peas and how

deep should you plant them? So how far apart? Well, it's a really good question, actually.

We've done quite a lot of trialing on this and we've tried putting one sweet pea at the bottom

of each cane or with us normally silver birch steak. And we've tried it with two and we've tried it with

three and i think two planted about 15 centimeters apart either side of a support is a really

ideal coverage it does slightly depend on variety some varieties are a bit more vigorous

but particularly if you're going for the old-fashioned types, like the most strongly centred of all, Machaicana, then I would definitely go for two. Would you agree, Josie?

Yes, I think that's about right. Yeah. Good. And then how deep? Well, we would never put sweet pea seeds straight out because they get eaten by mice.

They're mice caviar, we call them here.

So we would always sew them into a root trainer and you plant them at exactly the same level that they were in the root trainer.

And planting into a root trainer, I pushed them to the first sort of knuckle in my finger.

So I guess that's about two to three

centimetres deep. And always with seed, it's the bigger the seed, the deeper the seed, the deeper it can go

because it's got enough starch in the seed to allow the sprout to get up and start photosynthesizing

and making its own food, if you sort of mean.

So that's the first question. Josie, I'm going to give you the second. Thank you. So what are

the best plants to plant now? So in April we'd be planting out our hardy annuals. Yeah. So we've

been growing those either through from autumn if they've been overwintered in a cold frame

or we have quite a lot of spring sewn ones as well.

So they've been in the cold frames now hardening off for a few weeks.

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