I'm sharing with you some tips that i've learned over
years decades of growing celery
With varying amounts of success. I find it one of the harder vegetables to grow really well
It'll grow you can grow it. But if you want something like the celery you're probably used to buying which is so
crispy, and
Fleshy and watery
Well, you've got to give it a lot of water. That's that's the bottom line
And i'm on a fairly heavy soil here if you're on sandy soil, I would say you might struggle a bit
Just maybe water every day even just to keep that moisture level high and it will grow really fast
And repay you for that. It's the only vegetable I say that about it's it's a kind of marshland plant
so
Here we have celery celeriac celery celeriac. They're
Very similar in their needs except the celery needs more moisture than the celeriac
The, they were both sewn middle of march. That's a good time to make a first sewing or the only sewing in case of celeriac
and then
I do a couple of successive sewings through the summer into the autumn I didn't used to back in the 1980s
Summers were shorter then and I just did one sowing of celery and managed to make it last, you know, that is an option
What you find as the plants get older and we'll see in a minute is they
they throw out more side shoots and
Get perhaps a little bit more stringy and not quite so fresh and crisp
So I would say at least two sewings is worth it. Do do a second sewing
Middle of May say to follow the one in the middle of March
So we're now
early August and we're seeing the results of that first sewing
One big difference for me in
Success has been discovering f1 varieties
Now generally i'm not a great fan of f1
Their a bit Hybrid and commercial it's not the same as genetic modification by the way, but it's it's a kind of forced breeding
but it has made a huge difference and apparently all commercial celery in the uk at least is f1 varieties because you get
stronger growth in this case and
more even reliable harvest
victoria and adrian both two very good varieties
But what they are prone to what celery is prone to from this time of year onwards and as plants get older
Is something called
septoria
And there's just a very early and small indication of it there is where you start to see yellow
Blotches on leaves as some people call it celery blight
It's a bit like potato blight like blight on potatoes in terms of how it looks you get
I mean this has dried up since because we're august but if this was
october that would go really fast and the leaves would go brown and translucent and
Before long you wouldn't have many leaves left and then you get a discoloration of the stem as well
And most octobers in going to november. I lose my celeriac leaves to the same disease, so
Not much you can do about that. It's a kind of climatic thing, but it means you get healthier
Leaves and stems when in the first sowing than you do on later sowings going into the autumn
and i've just brought this leaf with me actually to
Show a different issue and I found this on some celeriac over there, which we haven't watered in it
The dry in the dry weather that's basically dry weather crispness
something you wouldn't want to see on your celery because it would mean the leaf gets very
stringy
So that just indicates that the plant needs some water but with celeriac at this time of year
I'm, not too worried about that because they're they're not
Swelling majorly at the moment. We'll start watering these in september more
So
When I sew them I sew them the seeds are really small sew them in
Seed tray tiny little seedlings. It's not practical to sew them in into even module trays then we prick them out
after about three weeks
Into little cells one each again not suitable for multi sowing you want a nice big
solid stem so I grow them one each and then
transplanted
after
last frost normally around the middle of may
Celery will take a bit of frost but not too much
Um, we have fleece over this for a while just to bring it on. Um, but
In the middle of may you've got to be careful of that. You don't need to get too hot and dry so
You could manage without that
and
If I now harvest some this will show what I want to explain a bit more
For example this one here
I'm actually I wouldn't normally uproot it like this
What I want to show you is
How dry this soil is it's incredible considering how much we've been watering
You can see a lovely root system there very vigorous
But this is telling me we need to order again basically, so if I cut that off
I want to leave that there
Now we've got the celery itself and
This illustrates the side shoots they make this is as they get older
So each of these is like a mini celery
growing out of the side
and
You can eat these
It's um for me it's more of a problem. If I was selling them. Nobody wants to buy sort of mini branches like that
But for one thing they do actually make really nice stock
classical cuisine
uses a lot of celery stock and if I trim this off now
We can see what's left
Which is not bad but starting to be a little bit of discoloration there
And i'm not always too sure what some of those marks are
But if I take the top off if you're going to keep this for any length of time
taking the leaves off like with any root vegetable is good because that means the
Plant is transpiring less and taking less moisture out. So
There we have a stick of celery and you can see it's not enormous, but it's pretty good
and here we have another one and the difference with this one is
I did a side shooting
And it is
Yeah, well, I think this one
Just taking the side shoots hasn't stopped it growing. That's for sure, but you can see basically I did that about um
Oh three or four weeks ago and there is one thaat has regrown since then that one
so if I take that one off and the leaf
And
Yeah, I think
I think on the whole it's been worthwhile. It's the first time I tried this in a kind of
comparison
there is a slightly smaller one next to it's not say they'll all get bigger for doing that but
They might
anyway, it's an option but it's I thought i'd mention it because it's something that's
I've, not really seen it mentioned
Anywhere celery side shoots
and
That gives you some ideas of how you can grow it perhaps a bit differently
And there we have it some very nice
celery ready to eat