Succession Planting: The Trick To Doubling Or Tripling Your Harvest

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Succession Planting: The Trick To Doubling Or Tripling Your Harvest

In one of my early years of gardening, I made a rookie mistake. I planted leaf lettuce — a lot of leaf lettuce. When those first early tender leaves started to appear out of the ground, fresh salad was a delightful treat.
But soon the lettuce was full on – and try as we might, we couldn’t pick or eat it fast enough! If I had better understood succession planting back then, we still could have had a steady supply without the rush to consume the lettuce before it turned bitter.

What is succession planting? Simply put, it is planting several crops in such a manner so that you’ll always have a steady harvest. This is an important part of planning your garden. Also, by having plantings of certain crops over time and intervals, you’ll reduce your chance of crop failure should you have an unexpected frost, infestation, etc.
There are three main methods of succession planting.
The first is to plant multiple varieties of the same crop which all have different maturity timeframes. This is convenient because it allows you to get all your planting done at once. The drawback to this method: It will require you to have a much larger garden.
The second method is to plant the same variety in intervals over time. Naturally, this means you’re going to have to spend more time working your garden, but it also means that you can get away with having a smaller plot because you can pull up old plants to replace them with new ones. This is called the “interval” method.

The final method is planting different crops in succession in the same space one after another. For example, you can plant cool weather crops in early spring such as lettuce, green onion, peas, radishes, etc., followed by warm weather crops in late spring/early summer such as peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini, followed again by cool weather crops as you go into August.

This method takes the most planning, but it can also be the most rewarding in terms of the amount and variety of produce that you will get out of one area.
Planning Succession Planting
Beginning the practice of succession planting in your garden is going to require a bit of planning on your part. Not only will you have to prepare your regular plan of where each crop is going to be located in your garden, but you’ll also have to figure out how much empty space (if using the interval method) you’ll need to leave…..More Here

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Succession Planting: The Trick To Doubling Or Tripling Your Harvest