growing up my grandpa the one we call Paw use to say or actually still does
say it but he'd say I like it when a plan comes together and for this spring
and early summer at least my succession planting plan has came together fairly
well for me succession planting is one of my favorite things about gardening
because it lets me try so many different varieties of the same crop we all don't
have room to plant every single variant of every crop in our first planting but
with succession planting we get to try a lot of different things and by the end
of the season we can kind of you know gather our notes together and see which
ones did the best for us and know which ones we want to plant in future years
now a lot of people will say well when I plant them squash and early spring and
we're picking squash for a couple months I just get tired of squash I don't want
any more squash I don't want to grow any more squash I don't want to have to find
something to do with all this squash but there are so many different varieties of
squash for example out there that you can grow straight neck crookneck
patty-pan lots of different colors of patty-pan zucchini green zucchini yellow
zucchini eight ball or round squash you know we've got yellow pale green and
dark green versions of those so lots of different stuff you can try and
succession planting is the way you to experiment and try those different
things so today I want to take the opportunity to show you how some of our
succession planting is going some of the varieties and our second plantings are
starting to produce now and we've even got our third plantings just up and
going just breaking the ground now this is the first year I have ever succession
planted sweet corn in the spring and early summer so we had some right there
we need to get that plot cleaned up a little bit and then this right here our
Temptress is just now starting to tassel we
should start seeing some silks pretty soon the pollen isn't matured on their
ready to fall off but it's getting there and we should start seeing silks as soon
as that has happened this stuff here considering the heat units can
considering how late corn usually tassels out shorter this here got you
know fairly tall we're on up about six feet in most places so nice-looking
second crop of sweet corn here we've been feeding it well and just super
super pleased with growing corn a second time here I'm glad I tried this and I'm
definitely going to be doing it in future years and I didn't plan for this
year but next year I'm probably gonna try squeezing a third kind of midsummer
crop of sweet corn in from my experiences here if I got it on drip
irrigation if I can give it plenty of water if I can fertilize it right when
it needs some nutrients I think I can pull it off so next year I'm going to
plan for three plantings of sweet corn so we have three harvests instead of
just one which we've had in the past now let's talk about our bean succession
planting so we had several different varieties of bush beans and even row of
pole beans over there and those all produce well for us we've
since got those out of here put those Canaria melons in we showed you that on
a previous video and our last succession planting of beans is right here these
half runner beans now these things are actually putting on beans there probably
be another day or so for I get in here and pick these guys now this was a
chance kind of a risk we were willing to take and this is always the case on that
last succession planting you do you see when it gets real hot these beans will
start dropping those blooms there these haven't started dropping so far that
I've noticed which means we're going to get at least one or two harvest off
these guys but that was just a you know it was just an experiment I really
to try these half runners here and if it did strike off way too hot and I started
dropping blooms oh well no big deal but it's always
worth trying to squeeze in one more crop there for a little extra production
so besides beans and corn the other two big crops that we succession plant
around here are squash and cucumbers and y'all just look at this plot here for a
minute now I got a few weeds in there because all this rain I need to clean it
up a little bit but man I'm super proud of how pretty this plot right here is
lots of good stuff in here sunflowers eggplant but we're gonna
focus on these squash and cucumbers right here so we had a plot of squash
way over there closer to the house planted and we've already got those up
and then these guys man they have grown fast and started producing I
believe it's only been 35 or 40 days since we planted these guys and already
starting to get some harvest we got several different varieties in here and
I want to show you what each of them is looking like kind of tell you about each
one so on the first row here is where we've got our round zucchinis and we've
got three different varieties here just basically three different colors of
these so the first third of the row is this variety called one ball and it's a
yellow round zucchini you can see them there that guy is ready to pick when
these guys get about the size of a pool ball like that that's when they're ready
to pick so we need to come in and grab a few of these there's another one right
there aren't those pretty and these
things are great you can slice them up cook them just like regular zucchini or
you can just cut them in half throw them on the grill and they're fine that way
so we got a few of those one ball plants here if we get on down here we'll see
our second variety and this right here is called cue ball and it's kind of this
light green round zucchini you see there and these things load up there's two on
that plant right there I need to get and then if we walk down towards end of the
row we'll see our third variety which is called eight ball
and there's one right there that's almost about to get too big you see
there it's a darker green than that other one there and really looking
forward to having all three of these colors here it's just gonna make a make
for pretty harvest but also gonna look good in our vegetable bags we do having
kind of that medley of colors from all three of these round zucchini
varieties and on our second row here is more traditional yellow squash first one
we've got here is our gold star which is a crookneck or kind of like a semi
crookneck smooth squash this was our winter from our first planting so we
carried it over this is the only variety that we've planted again from the first
planting because we liked it so much now here's a little example to show you when
you grow these things later in the summer disease pressure is going to be
higher and you just need to you know tamper your expectations a little bit
and know that these things ain't gonna last as long as that first crop did but
you're gonna get you some good harvest off of them but that disease is gonna
set in quicker because it's more humid out here it's hotter you know just
disease pressure gets higher so you're gonna start seeing a little bit of this
a lot sooner than you did on your spring plantings looks like some downy mildew
there but it is what it is and we'll get plenty of squash off these and then when
they just look like they're overtaken with disease we'll get them out of here
so the second variety here I want to show you and this this variety has been
absolutely amazing this variety is called Slick Pik now as I've said in
some of our other videos this squash is not gonna win any beauty contests but it
is the earliest producing squash I have ever seen it was least a week or so
ahead of that Goldstar which is an early producer itself makes these kind of long
slender squashes there see if I can find you a better picture here we go some of
them have a little bit of a curve or knot in them but there great little
slicing squash and they taste good nothing wrong with them at all they're
just not you know quite as pretty as that gold star is but I believe
this is the most productive variety of yellow squash I've ever grown look at
that one right there there's at least five or six squash on there at one time
just amazing how productive these things have been so if you want a quick crop of
squash you know you got a little bit of time you need something that's gonna you
know get going and produce fast a Slick Pik is the way to go
and our last row here for our second succession planting of squash zucchini
are these Pascola zucchinis here and you can always tell a zucchini leaf
because it's got those kind of incisions on them and those kind of white splotches
on them now this Pascola variety is a very very disease resistant variety one
reason why I wanted to plant it kind of test it out so we grow the spineless
supreme earlier this year now we've got the Pascola green zucchini and I do
believe these are slightly more productive than the spineless supreme
was I've been picking about two zucchinis off of these plants every
picking whereas when I grew the spineless supreme it was just kind of one big
zucchini so these are making a smaller and go back over here I'll show you
these appear to be making a smaller zucchini so not those big long ones like
the spineless supreme made but it makes more of them so if you like the smaller
zucchini and the heavier production this is a good way to go spineless supreme
just makes a bigger zucchini just not as many of them so we talked about corn
beans squash / Zucchini and the last thing we really like the succession
plant in the warm season is cucumbers so when our first planting of cucumbers we
grew some slicers over that way and our second planting we grew all pickles with
this max pack variety and I know y'all may be tired of hearing me talk about
this variety but this is the most amazing pickle variety I have ever seen
now you would think by now considering how long these things have
been growing that the production would have dropped off a little bit but
just hasn't still getting about a seven gallon bucket every other day off these
guys now whats kind of been nice so when they first started producing all my
cucumbers were kind of down here at the bottom where those vines kind of first
start growing so you kind of had to bend over and reach through there and fumble
through there and find all your pickles but now that they've got up on this trellis
good you see that foliage down there it's kind of starting to die off a
little bit look a little rough but this foliage up here still looks really good
and so now all my cucumbers are kind of up here in a waist level and come along
here with my picking bucket pick them a lot quicker they're easier to see and we
can just work through here better you can see a lot of times they'll double up
like that you just grab you a handful of pickles at a time when you're going
through and picking these guys so these guys I'm just gonna let them keep going
it's not like you know sometimes we see with squash they get disease-ridden and
we get them out of there where the production declines I haven't seen any
decline in production yet when that does happen or they look like they're real
disease I'll be glad to get them out of here quick but for right now man these
things will just keep kicking along and giving us some nice pickle production
here in the early summer and the last thing I want to show you guys here is my
third planting of squash and cucumbers which are just starting to break the
ground so for this third planting I've just got one row of squash and one row
of cucumbers over there in this plot here we still got some collards that are
hanging on there still probably pick those a couple more times
these marigolds are still looking awesome doing their thing we did throw
some drip underneath the marigolds and the collards which we didn't have before
because we definitely wanted to put these squash and cucumbers on drip so
this is a variety here called Alexandria this is a Lebanese squash never tried
growing these before we added them to the site earlier this year and looks
like I got real good germination there I planted the
guys thick because I needed more than one seed packet but not quite two so I
just went ahead and put two whole packets along this row I'll come in and
thin them out when they get a little bit bigger to every two foot or so but got a
nice little stand here and I expect these things to start taking off and
growing pretty fast and then for our cucumbers so we did slicers first we did
Diomede Stonewall first and we did the Max Pack pickles which just showed you
earlier and then for my third planting I'm going back to slicers here just to
keep it mixed up and we got a variety here called Olympian and I've grown this
one before makes a real nice uniform slicing cucumber this is a Gynoecious
variety so we always want to make sure we plant at least you know 20-25 seeds or
so so we get those male pollenizers plants planted and what thin these out a
little bit once they get taller will come in put in a Hortonova trellis there
so they can climb along that cause I got them tucked in here pretty tight between
the edge of this plot and those collards so as you can see succession planting
like we do allows us to try lots of different varieties of things like
squash cucumbers sweet corn and even beans and then we can take all that
information and understand which varieties are going to perform well for
us the next year so it's a great way to experiment with new variety it's also a
great way to test the disease resistance of some varieties because your disease
pressure is going to be higher you know this time of year in the summer so
testing some of these really you know highly acclaimed disease resistant
varieties to see how well they do in your climate with your disease pressure
so I know a lot of you may be wondering well what can I still squeeze in in my
zone where I'm at so just to give you a kind of some reference here we're in
zone 8b in South Georgia and I just planted that third crop of squash and
cucumbers about a week ago now I won't plant anymore that's my last planting
I probably could have planted them you know this week or today
and still been fine to get a little harvest there if you're north of us
you're in zone 8A 7B 7A or further up you probably still have time to squeeze
in one more crop of squash cucumbers maybe even beans certainly sweet corn so
for those of you watching out there tell me about your succession planting plan
for early to mid summer are you still putting things in the ground maybe
you're switching over to flowers and cover crops like we've done in some of
our plots what are you planting out there
what new varieties are you trying in this 2nd or 3rd succession planting I'll
put some links below to all the varieties we talked about that I showed
you today if you enjoyed this video make sure to give me a big thumbs up don't
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enjoy this one check out these other two videos right here that we've done on
succession planting in the past I think you'll really enjoy those as well we'll
see you next time