Maximize Your Harvest with Succession Planting

There are some people who participate in gardening as a Spring or Summer activity. Then there are those who want to use every available moment of their year to plant, grow and harvest their crops. 

Succession planting allows you to make the most out of your growing space, within the timeframe that you want to be gardening. Many people use succession gardening to keep a supply of food growing when they don’t have a lot of storage space for crops they harvest.

What Is the Purpose of Succession Planting

This process helps you extend your growing season by seeding your crops at intervals of 7 to 21 days giving you more produce than you previous got. There are some people who continually plant new seeds every couple of weeks, so that they can harvest new ones on an ongoing basis. 

Once the first crop goes to harvest, you can immediately replant that space with either more of the same crop or something new, such as a different vegetable entirely. It depends on what your preferences are. 

You can also mix the types of plants you’re growing so that some are providing food sooner than others. So for instance you might grow some peas that will harvest quickly, and also grow broccoli to harvest later in the season. 

Take a look at the growing “to maturity” rate for your favorite vegetables, like tomatoes, potatoes, peas, broccoli, carrots, squash, cauliflower and more and make a plan for how you’ll plant and grow the crops to ensure you have a reliable food source for as long as possible. 

Because the bed you’re planting in will be raising new seeds and plants, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing everything possible to enrich the soil. You don’t want it to get stripped of nutrients during the succession planting. 

How About Composting

Composting can help with this issue. You can even take the used and harvested plants and add them to your compost pile when you go to plant a new crop. Don’t just let the plants sit and take up space that could be used for something else. 

Sometimes, the succession period will depend on what region you’re growing your food in. For example, a warmer climate might get more harvest time than one with a very short warming window. 

If you’re in Texas, for example, you might be able to have a bean crop in the early Spring and then again in the late summer. Being a succession gardener is going to help you harvest food with amazing flavor and nutrients. You won’t be allowing it to sit stagnant, becoming bitter or inedible. 

Maximize Your Garden Space Using Interplanting

As a gardener, it’s sometimes frustrating to plant crops where you only have a short window of food provisions. This is fine if you’re growing crops to can or dehydrate for future use.

But you probably want to have a food source going at all times. One way to achieve this is to garden using the interplanting or intercropping strategy. This allows you to grow some slow growing plants along with some faster growing ones.

So while one is harvested more quickly, you know that after that harvest, your slower growing one will later come to maturity. There are different ways to do this. You can use the same garden space to achieve it – you don’t have to have one area for fast growing crops and another for slow growing ones. 

You can grow different speed growth plants in the same row, alternating the seeds and growing them side by side. In order to be successful with interplanting, you need to look at the time it takes for a seed to sprout and grow to maturity. 

Pair them up the right way, which means taking into consideration the depth of the roots and the shade factor, too. Some plants like carrots will have deep roots, so those might go well with lettuce, which is shallow – allowing them to share the space nicely. 

Interplanting requires you to make sure that one tall growing plant can’t tower over a slower growing one, blocking all sunlight that it needs. Some people interplant using food and pest repelling plants. 

So the second crop wouldn’t be a food plant, necessarily, but one that repels pests to allow the food crop to grow without interference. This allows you to grow plants without having to use harmful pesticides on them. 

The chemicals and scents in these crops keep pests away. There was one study done that showed how planting leeks in and among bean plants kept bean flies away from the crops due to the odor the leeks emitted. 

There is also a strategy called trap cropping. The trap crop that’s interplanted with the food plant is attractive to pests, keeping them away from the food plant. You can  put pesticides only on the trap plants, keeping the food ones clean and organic. 

Make sure the two crops you plant together are compatible. Sometimes, one plant can affect the taste of another, making it turn bitter. You also need to know that if one of the two crops is not a food plant, it will mean less harvest for you, so always try to find a food seed to intercrop with.