I believe succession sowing is the most underrated tool of a good gardener.
Succession sowing is going to open your harvest window immensely. It's going to
increase your productivity. It's going to make sure that what you're growing
actually reflects what you want to be eating in your kitchen. Succession sowing
is pretty simple -- it's just staggering our planting dates to make sure that we
get a wider harvest window. As a northern gardener, I know all too well that many
of us get really excited in the spring, as soon as that last frost pass we go
out, we plant the entire garden one time, and then in two months we're left
scratching our heads like 'oh, is it over already? That was quick.
So succession sowing is gonna help us to really open up that window. Another
reason I love succession sowing is it does increase the yield that you have in
your garden, because you're really never wasting any time with a plant that's
dead and taking up space. You're pulling it out and you're putting something
productive right in its place. So we're increasing our yield. Finally the reason
I love succession sowing is that it really can be tailored to our culinary
needs. PS every gardener in every climate can do some level of succession sowing.
If you're way far up north you might think that you can only plant right as
soon as that frost pass and that's about it.
No, no! Actually way super far up north in northern Maine, Eliot Coleman is
succession sowing to have a harvest all year round. He's doing four-season
gardening, so it's totally possible way up north. Down south, a lot of us think it
might get too hot for us to sow certain things. No no we have things like
longevity spinach and sweet potato and callaloo amaranth and hot peppers that
we can get in later in the season, even when it gets excruciating ly hot out. So
it doesn't matter if you're way up here north way down South, succession planting
is for you.
If you are the organized type, you can get your information together and make a
nice planting calendar. I do think it's really worth the effort.
So we're just gonna compile some key information before we make our plan. So
figure these things out. First, when can you sow crops depending on your
area? You can figure this out actually by googling a month-by-month planting
calendar for your state, because you might not know most universities by
state will have a gardeners planting calendar by month, which will basically
let you know when you can start and stop planting lettuce, peppers, tomatoes, and
this is tried and true information. Someone has already tried and failed or
tried and succeeded and taken their notes and made them available to you. The
other great thing about those charts is they're usually broken down by micro-
regions, so you can find information for coastal California and high desert
California and everywhere in between. Just look it up on the internet, it's
actually incredible information. Also don't forget to reach out to your local
Master Gardeners organization because they too will have some really great
planting calendars for you. Also if you go on the rareseeds website we've got
the Clyde's Garden Planner and that is about the size of an index card. It's got
this incredible chart for spring on one side, fall on the other and it's gonna
tell you when you can sow certain crops depending on your region and the time of
year. It's super handy and it's a great cheat sheet.
Ffinally just check the back of that seed package. You're gonna find some really
essential information, like whether a crop is early maturing, late to mature or
whether it's got days to maturity that are fairly tried-and-true. So you can
find that information on the back of your seed packet and add it into the mix when
you're determining when you're going to plant your crops.
OK, so maybe you don't want to put in the effort of making a calendar and
writing it out -- that's fine. You can do the pull and plant method.
what's the pull and plant method? It's pretty simple. Basically you come out to
your garden, you realize that your lettuces have bolted, you go "up you're
gone!" Toss it, then you're gonna just dig up
the soil, get it a little bit aerated, maybe add a little compost or organic
fertilizer in there to really refresh things and get another crop in its place.
You might direct sow some seeds, perhaps you have some little starts that you've
already got ready to go on deck to plant in the ground, and one tip that's really
important with the pull and plant method is change plant families when you
replace a plant. So if you pull out a Brassica like kale make sure that you
don't go putting brussel sprouts in its place because pest pressure, disease
pressure, has built up in in that place in the garden from your previous
planting. So switch it up with the plant family. Pull out a kale, put in a tomato.
Super-important: make sure to keep the planting area cool. When we get into the
second and third and fourth sowing of the season, even in a northern climate,
the soil is gonna be pretty warm. It might even be too warm for good
germination. So we're gonna employ a few tips and tricks to lower the temperature
of that soil, increase the moisture so that the germination stays high and the
plants stay healthy and happy. So one thing is using a little bit of drip
irrigation - that's super helpful. Drip irrigation is going to keep your soil
consistently moist, so that you have better germination. As the summer gets
hotter, your seeds are going to dry out faster and easier. So make some
consistent irrigation in your garden.
And another step is plant your seeds twice
as deep in the summertime because the soil is a little cooler the farther down
you go. So in the spring you're gonna plant things say a half-inch you're
gonna go for an inch during the summer because it's gonna be a little bit
cooler down there it's gonna stay a little bit more moist, so plant a little
deeper, keep that soil moist .Finally we're going to utilize our micro-
climates in the garden. So if we've got a big towering wall of corn it's creating
a lot of shade, so we're going to maybe in the shady space underneath the corn
and plant something like a lettuce. Maybe a lettuce planted in June in your area
would fry up if it was in full sun , but if it's in the shade of a nice wall of
corn you might actually thrive. So utilizing your little shady microclimate
is a great way to extend how long you can sow something.
Did you know that your plants actually grow a little bit slower when they're
planted in the summer? It's true. Things that are planted in the early spring, in
the spring, they're actually going to grow faster because the days are a bit a
little bit longer, and after the summer solstice, which is about mid to late June,
you're going to find that your plants actually grow a bit slower. So when we
look at our days to maturity for a certain crop we're actually going to add
two weeks to that to compensate for that slower summer growth.
Finally, try things like small-batch planting and techniques like inter-
planting. Small-batch planting means I know that I don't need 20 plants of
lettuce to come into maturity at all at the same time, so I might keep my lettuce
patch empty, planting 1 to 2 plants every week, week and a half and just planting
along the block to make sure that I have lettuce at about the same, at about their
desired rate, rather than having all of it coming in at once.
This really comes into play when we're talking about our excitement in the
spring, where we want to fill our entire garden all the way up. You may keep a
little bit a little patch empty or maybe put something super-quick growing like a
radish in there that way you can make sure that you put some small batches so
that we really get things going throughout the season that reflect what
we actually, how we want to eat. Inter- planting is really fascinating that is
where we plant different crops together and we utilize their space needs to get
more out of the same time planting. So a great example is carrots and radishes. So
I will plant, so usually you'll plant an entire band of carrot seed and the
carrots gonna take forever to germinate and forever to get growing and then
you're gonna have to thin them out because you sow them very thick and then
you thin them out and it's a slow process, and that carrot bed isn't gonna
really give you much for a long time. So instead what we're going to do is we're
gonna take a little time, it goes a little slower like this but you plant a
couple carrots and then a radish, a couple carrots and then a radish. The
radishes are gonna grow much much faster than the carrots, We're gonna pull those
radishes, harvest them, and that way your carrots can come in and grow into their
space and they don't need as much thinning. So it takes a little more time
at the beginning, but it does save spac.e That's really a trick for a smaller
garden you wouldn't want to do that on a huge scale, cuz it'd be take forever to
sow your seeds. But just a little gardeners trick. So that's it! Those are
my tips for succession planting. I hope you guys have a wildly abundant season
and check back for more garden tips and tricks.
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