Oregon Sugar Pod II Pea Plants

This post attempts to document my first experience with growing Oregon Sugar Pod II pea plants. As you may already know, powdery mildew killed them. What you see above are the peas that I was able to harvest. I planted the peas around the end of February or the end of March and had peas by the end of May. It doesn't sound like a long time but when you're looking at them every day it seems like forever. Fortunately, pea plants grow quite quickly compared to other plants which makes them good for instant gratification for new growers like myself.






Sugar Snap Peas


Pea pods!!!


Pea blossoms!!!











I got these sticky traps when I noticed green aphids on the undersides of my pea leaves, little gnat-like bugs jumping around in the soil, and whiteflies. The traps didn't seem to catch many insects. Surprisingly, they stay sticky even after torrential downpours.

Powdery Mildew on Peas

See the white spots? This is what powdery mildew looks like. It killed all of my pea plants before I could get a significant crop. It spreads like crazy and trying to control it by removing the infected leaves didn't work for me. Next time I would try using some sort of organic gardening approved chemical (it sounds wrong, I know) to stop it, or try to improve the conditions under which I grow my peas so that they are less likely to be susceptible to the disease in the first place.

Powdery mildew seems to appear out of thin air. When you rub the powdery white spots on leaves, it leaves a sticky residue on your fingertips and the area underneath where the mildew was will be yellow. Powdery mildew causes plant leaves to turn yellow and fall off, and it also eventually kills the stems (though the telltale white spots won't usually appear on the stems themselves), which cuts off any growth that would still be occuring on the part of the plant that doesn't yet appear to be sick.



It can take a few weeks for powdery mildew to completely kill off a plant, but its nefarious effects on your plant's production set in much sooner. While your plant will stay green for some time, once powdery mildew is present, the clock is ticking, and vegetable production will grind to a halt within 7-14 days (at least, that was my experience). So if your plant has powdery mildew and it hasn't even started producing anything yet, toss it. Powdery mildew is spread easily by wind, and you don't want your other plants to get infected (though it may already be too late).