What's going on everyone?!
Today we're going to be talking about a topic that is honestly pretty confusing for most gardeners and also for myself when I started out.
That topic would be...
Succession planting.
This is something that a lot of growers do if they're a market gardener, because it is the life blood of that model. You have to know when to plant things, when things are coming out of the ground, and when to put new things in so you have a constant stream of produce that you can sell at market.
But, what about us home gardeners? Is it still important? Well, that's up to you, but in my mind, yes, it definitely is.
It's pretty easy once you get your head around it, and it's great for home gardeners so you can get more production. I mean, that's what it's all about. Do you have a small space? If so, maybe you want to make use of that small space, and make sure that you have greens, veggies and fruits constantly pumping out of the garden.
How do we get started with succession planning? First of all, it's all about choosing your varieties. So, almost any crop can be succession planted, but there are different crops that you would succession plant for different reasons, and they would offer different results.
Let's talk about something like a broccoli or a cabbage. A lot of the times people will succession plant these to get more than one harvest. They might do something like two successions of summer squash or cucumbers instead of a lot of plants at the exact same time. If you did a lot of plants at the same time, then all of a sudden come fall, you'd have all of your cucumbers coming out at the exact same time.
No one really likes that because you're going to have two weeks at your house where all you're eating is cucumbers, and then the rest of the year, you have nothing, unless you get into pickling and preserving, which is a whole other issue.
A lot of times people will do this with the quicker growing crops. So, radishes, green onions, carrots, these are great for planting in successions, because of two reasons.
First, they don't take up a whole lot of space. You can leave sections of your garden empty, and sow every two weeks, then all of a sudden you have this nice rotating harvest of carrots that are coming out of a bed.
Another thing you can do with the radishes, Swiss chard, onions, carrots, things like that, you can sneak them in between other plants that take a lot longer.
Let's say you have a cabbage bed. Cabbage takes quite a while to grow. Well, there are probably a couple of areas in that bed where you could sneak a couple radishes in, sneak a couple carrots in there, and then you get a quicker harvest, and you can plant those radishes a different time than your normal radish bed. Then, you're pulling radishes out at a more consistent basis over the course of a season.
Let's get into the most important part of succession: the planning. This is one of the times in the garden where it really does help to have a plan because you're going to need to know a few different things. You're going to need to know what you want to grow, you're going to need to know how long it takes for those plants to come to harvest, as well as how long your growing season is.
Let's take the example of lettuce, because lettuce is something that I can grow year round. If I want to succession plant lettuce, then I need to come up with a system that allows me to plant it and harvest it year round.
What you want to do is you want to think, lettuce takes 30 days to come to maturity on average. If I was to plant every single month, I could get 12 harvests of lettuce a year. So, once a month, my whole lettuce bed I would pull out.
But what if I wanted a more consistent supply? What if I wanted lettuce every week? Then, I have to start sowing my lettuce every week.
- Week one I will sow and then nothing will come out.
- Week two I will sow, and nothing will come out, but my week one lettuce will be a week old.
- Week three I will sow, nothing will come out, week two lettuce is one week old, week one lettuce is two weeks old. - Week four I will sow, and then I have a one week, two week and three week old crop of lettuce.
- Finally, on week five I'll make a sowing, and then I'll have a one, two, three and four week old crop of lettuce.
So, I can start cropping out that four week old crop of lettuce because now we're at that 28-30 day range. Then, what happens when I harvest that crop? I sow in the spot that I harvested out of.
Think of it like The Wave at a baseball stadium, where The Wave comes and goes around the stadium, that's basically what you're doing if you think about it in a sped-up way.
Imagine you have your bed, and you're planting one, two, three, four. One, two three, four. One, two, three, four, and it just ebbs and flows like that.
The row that you're harvesting is the row that you plant in. Once you start getting that math right, you basically have a perfect, and almost automated system for generating as much lettuce as you want.
Now, that is, of course, the easiest example because not only does it grow quickly, but you can, in most areas of the world, grow it pretty close to year round, or at least pretty close to the full growing season.
That is the basic, basic, BASIC version of succession planting. I would love to know if that was confusing. It can be hard to describe in an audio and text format, so hopefully that was illuminating and helpful.
If not, I do have a video and a blog post that I am going to put up about this topic. They're not up yet, but they will be soon. So, definitely tune in for those.
Until next time, guys, good luck in the garden. Keep growing. Give succession planting a shot. I am doing it in my garden this year with pretty much everything I'm growing, but especially the lettuces and the herbs. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think. Kevin► Listen on DSound
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