(Tiny Tips) – Succession Planting – Is this your first time starting a vegetable garden this year? Most non-gardeners think of starting a garden as something you do one day in the spring. However, if you want your garden to be a primary source of food, you need to understand and practice succession planting.
One and Done For
“Lying in the garden” on a sunny spring weekend has huge emotional appeal. But if you plant everything at once, everything will ripen immediately. When the glut ends, so does your gardening season.
Some plants, such as peas, beans and tomatoes, may continue to produce for a slightly longer period. If you plant your entire garden at once, and only once, your garden will typically only produce a lot of food for a short period of time. If you garden for fun, this may be fine.
However, if you want your garden to replace your weekly trips to the grocery store, you’ll need a more sophisticated planting plan.
What Is Succession Planting?
Even former gardeners usually realize that some vegetables can be planted when the weather is cool, while others must wait until soil temperatures warm. This can result in too many vegetables. Therefore, it is best to carry out a series of consecutive harvests during the growing season.
Succession planting is more than just planting different vegetables at the times they are most likely to survive. Sequential planting is a detailed system for planning the quantities and maturity dates of each vegetable you plant to avoid producing too much produce at once and ensure a longer harvest – even into next spring.
Staggered Planting
Planting small quantities of each variety successively throughout the period when temperatures are suitable for planting ensures a more even and continuous harvest. This strategy is especially useful for plants like lettuce, which all mature once. But it’s even useful for plants like indeterminate tomatoes that continue to produce fruit until frost. The first fruit set is usually the most productive. When yields from older plants decline, staggered planting can increase yields.
How long should you wait between successive plantings? The exact planting interval depends on many factors, including the size of the garden, temperature, and how long each variety takes to mature. However, there are some general guidelines for different cultures.
Successive Crops
Some vegetables take longer to grow than others. Leeks can take up to 170 days to mature. They take up space in your garden throughout the growing season. But other vegetables ripen quickly, too: radishes take less than a month from sowing to harvest, and some lettuces mature in as little as 45 days.
Sequential cultivation exploits these differences in maturity rates and optimal planting times to produce multiple harvests per season in the same garden area. For succession planting, it is helpful to divide crops into categories: short season, half season, and long season.
- Short-season crops, such as lettuce, radishes and green onions, can be grown as cutting crops or multiple times during a season.
- Depending on frost dates, semi-season plants such as bush beans, cucumbers, and zucchini can often replace early-maturing, fast-growing cool-season crops, or be replaced by mid-summer plants for fall harvest.
- Long-term crops such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplants occupy space in most northern gardens all season long.
Even different varieties of the same vegetable can have different levels of ripeness. For example, pepperoni may take 60 to 90 days. Maximize the yield of successive crops by selecting the fastest-growing varieties of each crop.
Intercropping
Sometimes, it is not necessary to harvest one crop before planting another. Pair planting or intercropping is another way to take advantage of the unique needs of different plants.
The Three Sisters planting is a prime example, as the heavily fed corn acts as a trellis for nitrogen-fixing beans, while the pumpkins grow low to the ground, suppressing weeds and locking in soil moisture.
Other cover planting strategies include planting cool-season plants in the shade of warm-season plants; mixing fast-growing and slow-growing plants and harvesting the fast-growing plants before they get too big; and planting deep-rooted plants near shallow-rooted plants.
Succession Planting Schedules
There are many good books on extending the gardening season that explain succession planting in detail (The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener is a classic). However, for specific advice on succession planting programs in your area, please contact your local regional office.
Feature image by Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash.
Originally published on May 26, 2021, this article was updated in May 2023.