Resilient Food Gardening

- Mike Bernhard   

Succession Planting of Salad Vegetables: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. 

In the old days, when the weather was more stable, it was possible to plant a vegetable garden in one day at the end of May.  Occasionally a hot, dry spring would yield 20 feet of lettuce fit only for compost, or a cool, wet summer would produce a dozen giant pepper plants, with no peppers.  Yet every year, many, if not all crops would do well.  But these days, even green beans are at the mercy of wild weather and its attendant patterns of insects and disease.

There are many strategies that can reduce losses to wild weather:

            - season-extending techniques that create protected sites for heat- or shade-loving plants 

-   improvement of the water-storage capacity of soils by increasing their organic matter levels

- row covers, low tunnels and hoop houses that affect temperatures and moisture levels

My main strategy for coping with extreme weather is “succession planting”. Rather than planting my hardy vegetable seeds – salad and cooking greens, roots and scallions – all on one day, I now make much smaller plantings every three weeks between mid-March and the last of August.

Because I started my gardens (thirty years ago) on compacted, infertile, gravelly soil, I shoveled the soil out of 18” wide paths and onto 30” wide growing beds. But I still seeded in rows running the length of those beds.  Depending on the weather (mostly) I might end up with 25 feet of beautiful spinach plants all ready the same day or, worse, 25 feet of flowering spinach-gone-to-seed.

Gradually it dawned on me that the best outcome would be for my garden to yield a basket of “salad vegetables” every week from May to October: several lettuces, a few carrots, a handful of green beans, a couple of fennel bulbs, two bunches of radishes, three or four beets, some spinach.  So, to avoid having too much or too little of what I wanted to eat during the growing season, I began to plant rows of seeds across my 30” beds, and I began to plant those short rows more often.

Early in the season (last half of March), my first “succession bed” is seeded to veggies most likely to sprout and thrive in cool weather: spinach, radishes, beets, carrots, several kinds of lettuce, scallions.  This bed, 30” wide and 6’ long, has six or eight rows : a couple of rows of different larger, spreading  lettuces, alternate rows with faster-to-mature spinaches and more-upright carrots and beets.  Radishes might be sown on both sides of a band of scallion or pearl onion seeds. 

Three weeks later I seed the same crops – remember these are very short rows – plus a second bed of fennel, arugula, endives and radicchio. 

By the time the third set of two succession beds are planted, it’s already unlikely that spinaches will mature before the weather turns too hot, so spinach drops out of the plan, to return again in the mid-August succession beds.  Lettuce and radishes drop out in July, skipping one or two succession plantings.  They return in August, too.

Over the years, experience has shown which planting dates work for which crops. Not every seeding of every crop will yield; the point is to always push the boundaries at both the cold ends of the season, and in the hot middle.  It is the small amount of work that is committed to each succession bed that allows for a range of planting dates for each vegetable or variety.  It is that range that provides for resilience; you know some plantings of carrots will work well; some not so well.  But you aren’t overwhelmed by your successes or devastated by failure because you haven’t put all your eggs in one basket.

If you practice succession planting of salad vegetables the way I do, you will also notice that each vegetable type will also differ in their relation to plant pests and diseases.  Slugs and lettuce bottom rot have their season, as do carrot rust and spinach aphids. 

Next season, plant your salad vegetables in succession beds and see if you can’t replace the feast-or-famine pattern of gardens-gone-by with a steady supply of salad makings from May to October.

(This article from pages 9 - 10, Winter 2013 issue, The Afton Vision)