Sweet-peas grow very tall if they are healthy and properly staked, so they should be sown all along the back of your border to make a hedge. If you buy a packet of some expensive variety that gives you only a few seeds, you might sow those separately in a circle. The best month for sowing is March, and you must dig your trench six inches deep and three inches wide. If there are many mice about who would eat your seeds, it is a good plan to soak them in paraffin a few minutes before sowing. Gardeners often damp them and shake them in powdered red lead, but as this is poison it must be used with care. It is not always effectual, either. We once saw a mouse caught ‘red-handed,’ his little paws coated with the lead we had put on our seed to protect it from him. When your trench is ready, sow your seed singly all along the row, leaving two inches between each seed. If your two borders are each seven feet long, you would sow forty-two seeds on either side, so you see that you can only grow a few kinds in one summer. When you have sown them, do not cover them with all the soil you have dug out. They should only have three inches on them at first, because the seedling wants to find its way up to the spring sun. Later on, when it is a strong plant, and supported by a twig, you can put back the rest of the soil. Sweet-peas are very thirsty plants, and when the long dry days come they like to have their roots deep down in the moist earth. Their two great enemies are slugs and sparrows. In or near a town where sparrows swarm, you cannot grow Sweet-peas at all unless you protect the young shoots when they first show above the ground—about three weeks, that is, after the seed is sown. Later, when the leaves expand, the birds leave the plants alone. You can buy either ready-made pea-guards or a length of wire-netting, which should be doubled in the middle and put over your row like a long tent, with sticks at either end to keep it firm. If you cannot have wire put a double line of sticks at intervals along your row, and wind black cotton across and across from one stick to the other. This terrifies the sparrows, and they will not go near it. If you have many slugs, you should keep the ground near the seeds sprinkled with soot or lime. As soon as the plants are three inches high, they should be thinned to six inches apart, and should have a row of small twigs stuck all along the line for their tendrils to seize. When they are a foot high, you can earth them up with the soil left on one side of the trench, but you must put it evenly on either side of your Peas. When they reach the top of the little twigs, the tall ones must be put in firmly on either side of the row, and by the middle or end of June your Peas should be in flower. If you want your plants to last in flower all the summer and well into the autumn, you must not let them form a single seed-pod. Every day you should cut both your fresh flowers and any withered ones you see.