Can You Grow Snap Peas on Your Deck?

Location

• Snap peas love cool weather and won't grow well on a hot, sun-beaten deck. On the other hand, shady decks don't supply the six to eight hours of sunlight that snap peas require for healthy growth. Fortunately, snap peas can germinate on your sunny deck when soil temperatures are cold enough to make other vegetables shudder. When your soil temperatures reach 45 degrees Fahrenheit, plant your snap peas. If your deck doesn't receive enough sunlight to support snap peas, however, find a sunny location elsewhere.

Varieties

• Select snap pea varieties that won't grow out of bounds. Sugar Snap, for example, sends 5- to 6-foot long tendrils climbing along your deck railing. Sugar Ann, on the other hand, stays a tidy 20 inches. Consider the variety's maturation rate as well, especially if the future spring temperatures will overheat your deck. Sugar Bon and Early Snap ripen in just two months, but Sugar Daddy needs almost three months to mature. Peas subjected to hot weather can still produce a few pods, but the texture and flavor suffers.

Container

• Choose a container at least 12 inches deep. Pots or containers on sunny decks dry out quickly, and the larger the container, the less often you'll need to water. Giving a snap pea the largest container possible ensures your peas won't wither through a hot afternoon, and larger containers give you room for a small trellis for varieties with longer vines. The container's material is as important as its size. Porous terra cotta pots dry out quickly, while glazed or plastic pots retain moisture. Metal pots heat up quickly, and a metal pot on a sunny deck could cook your plant's roots.

Soil

• Peas, like clover and other legumes, grow in a mutually beneficial relationship with a helpful bacterium named rhizobium. These bacteria, which grow at the pea plant's roots, take foliage-boosting nitrogen from the air and make it available to the plant. Most potting soils are sterilized and don't contain rhizobium. While having this bacteria in the soil isn't vital, you'll have a bigger, better quality harvest if you coat the seeds with prepared inoculum powder.