Definition: Succession Planting is a way to extend your harvest by staggering plantings of crops or planting varieties with staggered maturing dates. There are basically 4 methods of succession planting:
- Same Vegetable, Staggered Plantings: Space out plantings of the same crop every 2-4 weeks. Many vegetables fade after producing their initial crop, setting a heavy crop initially, then smaller and smaller yields throughout the summer. Rather than planting your entire row of beans all at once and having feast or famine, you can plant part of the row at the beginning of the season and then plant more in about 2-4 weeks. A new crop will be continually coming in. As the first plants start to flag, you can replant that area with beans or use it for a different crop.
- Different Vegetables in Succession: Some crops like peas, have short growing seasons and the space they were using can be replanted with a later season crop, like eggplant.
- Two Vegetables in the Same Space: Some vegetables can share space amicably. You can plant early corps that will be removed from the garden with late season crops. Radishes are often planted with carrots. The radishes mature quickly and loosen the soil for the late sprouting carrots.
Another example of intercropping is using the shade from tall growing vegetables, like tomatoes, corn or pole beans, to shelter lettuce during the heat of the summer.
- Same Vegetable, Different Maturity Rates: An easy way to keep your harvest coming in is to choose more than one variety of a crop and make then early, mid and late season varieties. Sometimes the seed packet will be labeled as such and sometimes you’ll just have to read the “Days to Maturity†number, but tomatoes, corn, squash and several other vegetables can be staggered throughout the growing season this way.
Alternate Spellings: successive planting
Common Misspellings: succestion planting, succesion planting
Examples:
I planted bush beans in succession every two weeks during the summer and had a continual harvest until frost.
