> Next: Grid Planting Diagrams
Succession Plantings for Extended Harvests
On this page, you’ll find a detailed example to use as a guide for making your own vegetable succession diagrams for a continual harvest throughout the growing season, including:
-
- How successions work.
- Planting periods in the gardening season.
- When to plant cool-season and warm-season vegetables.
Why Grow Succession Plantings?
Planting successions in the same bed lets you grow and harvest different types of vegetables during a single season [see Planting Vegetable Successions]. For convenience, this example bed is shown below at three different times during the gardening season.
Many different successions are possible. Typically, start the year with plantings of fast-maturing, cool-season vegetables. As they are harvested, plant warm-season species to replace some or all of them.
Multiple Planting Periods
Succession plantings are most beneficial to those who garden in regions with long growing seasons. Still, every growing area can produce multiple crops in a single season by using season extenders in spring and autumn.
Break down your growing season, using its average last-frost date in spring and first-frost date in autumn. For an example, the growing season in a typical year in a given region might have a last frost on March 15 and its first frost on October 10. That gives a total growing season of 209 days.
Planting One. By planting cool-season vegetables’ seed indoors early in February, transplants can be good sized by March 1 [See: Starting Plants Indoors]. Frost covers and mulching beds will allow early plantings two weeks before the last expected frost [See Row Covers and Mulch Cloth].
In a similar way, frost covers and mulching will add two to three weeks to the season in autumn. Altogether, that makes the effective growing season about 33 days longer, 242 days.
Planting Two. With that early start and the first crop in on March 1, continuous-harvest vegetables that mature in 60 days such as peas and snap beans will be finished producing 60 days after planting, or May 1. Be ready to plant seed of warm-season, 110-day, harvest-at-maturity vegetables then, right into the beds that held the peas and beans.
Planting Three. Those vegetables will take the entire 110 days to finish on August 18. It will be time to switch back to cool-season, continual harvest vegetables and plant from seed into the garden soil again. With cold protection to keep them producing, you’ll harvest right up until November 1, when you’ll remove your crops from your beds and prepare them for winter.
Use this process for your own region, growing season, and goals.
An Example of Succession Planting
The following 3-step planting plan diagrams will help you visualize the process described earlier on this page. They show three separate plantings in a single growing season.
The 3-step plans calls for multiple harvests of mixed cool-season and warm-season vegetables, including continuous-harvest vegetables with several pickings and mature-harvest vegetables with a single harvest when they ripen.
The concept is simple, but it does require understanding the time each species takes to reach maturity and each plant’s spacing requirements. You’ll quickly master the process and be ready to plant.