Summer Succession Planting for a Greater Harvest - Ep. 204

[00:00:00] We are officially in summer in the northern hemisphere and for many of us she came in with a bang. It hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit here today with a heat index of 112 and it feels like walking in front of a blast furnace when you walk out into the sun.

[00:00:17] This may make you think that the summer growing season is a one-and-done situation, especially if you live somewhere further south than me where the temperatures can be even more brutal on a more regular basis. I'm here to tell you that is not the case.

[00:00:32] In fact, even if you live further north of me where the temperatures are just now finally warming up enough to start planting those warm season crops,

[00:00:42] there are a slew of things that can be grown in the summer garden that you can plant multiple times to get a greater harvest. Today on Just Grow Something we'll talk about the top five crops in different climates that can be successively planted throughout the summer.

[00:00:58] Whether your warm season is short or you're gardening in a sauna, I guarantee there is something you can grow multiple times to increase your yield. Even if it feels like somebody opened the gates of Hades in your front yard. Let's dig in.

[00:01:15] Hey, I'm Karin. I started gardening in a small corner of my suburban backyard and now 18 years later I've got a degree in horticulture and operate a 40 acre market farm.

[00:01:23] I believe there is power in food and that everyone should know how to grow at least a little bit of their own. On this podcast I share evidence-based techniques to help you plant, grow, harvest and store all your family's favorites.

[00:01:36] Consider me your friend in the garden. So grab your garden journal and a cup of coffee and get ready to Just Grow Something. Finally vacation. Soon you'll be sitting relaxed on the beach, but first you have to get to the airport early tomorrow. Relax.

[00:02:16] So one of my goals with gardening is to get the biggest yield out of my beds as possible. Some of this is from a farm business perspective. If something's gonna take up space in the field for a specific amount of time, then it better be profitable.

[00:02:34] If that means I have to plant it multiple times in the same bed, then that's what I do. But I also want my raised planters in the kitchen garden and by the greenhouse to be the most productive they can be too. This is more of a use-of-space perspective.

[00:02:52] Oftentimes those planters are what I'm cooking with, what I'm preserving for our own use or they're where I'm growing specialty varieties or experimental ones that I'm trialing before deciding to grow them on a larger scale. So no matter which scenario we're looking at,

[00:03:10] succession plantings are always a part of that plan. What works for me in my climate will not work for everybody. I know that gardeners in the hottest parts of North America can't grow tomatoes through the summer. They just don't produce anything or they actually burn up.

[00:03:27] I also know that my gardeners in cooler climates have a very short window of time to get their warm weather crops in. This does not mean that we can't be planning

[00:03:38] successions for the edges of the summer and some of us can do them right through the hottest part of our season. Now what I'm talking about here is a little different than planning for a fall garden.

[00:03:51] We're focusing today on things that we can plant in the summer months for a summer harvest. Not necessarily what we'd plant at the end of summer to harvest in the fall or to overwinter. We'll talk about planning your fall garden next week. Right now, let's stick with summer.

[00:04:06] So let's talk about the unique challenges summer gardening brings in each area and come up with some strategies for planting crops multiple times to increase our yield. I'm not going to do this by specific hardiness zones for this because maps based on the USDA extreme minimum temperature approach

[00:04:29] just doesn't work well for us here. We're not as concerned about how cold it actually gets during the middle of the winter time in your area. We're more concerned about the number of frost free days and

[00:04:42] your actual average high temperature during the summer. You can be gardening in zone 6B in Canada and it will look very different from my zone 6B here in the States. Let me give you an example. Let's take Halifax, Nova Scotia.

[00:05:01] According to how the USDA hardiness zones are figured, Halifax is zone 6B, just like me. But my average summer temperatures are highs of 88 Fahrenheit or 31 Celsius with around 180, 182 frost free days. In Halifax, the summer temperatures are highs of 76 Fahrenheit or 24 Celsius and around 160 to 164 frost free days.

[00:05:31] That's a big difference when it comes to heat loving crops. So I'm going to use generalizations like cooler climate, short season, etc. instead of referring to hardiness zones. You will have a pretty good idea of where you fall while we're talking about this.

[00:05:49] Let's start with my cool climate or short summer season gardeners. This is you if your last and first frost dates each season narrow those frost free growing days down to about four, four and a half months or so.

[00:06:03] Or if your average daytime temperatures just barely eke above like 75 Fahrenheit or 23.9 Celsius. This doesn't mean that you don't get some awful high heat, but they're just not your average. This often means that you're getting things like tomatoes

[00:06:23] planted maybe as late as June and then harvesting sometime in August and then maybe seeing your first frost as early as September. In your case, fast maturing varieties and smaller versions of them like peppers or melons and

[00:06:38] determinate varieties of things like tomatoes are your best bet for getting a good yield from those heat loving plants. These are likely a one-and-done sort of crop for you. But this also means that you can be

[00:06:53] successively planting the crops from your cooler shoulder seasons right on through the short summer months. Which is going to enable you to continuously harvest some crops or have a fresh crop sort of ready to go as soon as the months start to turn cool again.

[00:07:08] So if we look at an example of a climate like this, we're gonna take Bemidji, Minnesota. Yes, that Bemidji. Where are my Fargo fans? Okay. Bemidji only has 120 frost free days for summer gardening and the summer daytime highs average only around 79 degrees Fahrenheit for those few months.

[00:07:30] For my warmer zone gardeners, think about how you plan your summer garden and how you work in your summer garden and then figure out how you do all of that in a period of barely four months.

[00:07:45] It is not easy gardening in these types of areas. So kudos to my short season gardeners for getting it done. So if you garden someplace like this, here are the top five crops I think you can successively plant in the summer to increase your yield.

[00:08:03] And the first one is those leafy greens. So spinach, lettuce, arugula, baby greens like chard and kale if you're harvesting the whole plant of those. These are all gonna do well in places where the average highs are below 80 Fahrenheit during the summertime.

[00:08:19] Now if it does tend to sort of jump up occasionally above that in your area, you can plant these sort of below the taller crops or maybe on the north side of

[00:08:32] the taller crops that can sort of shade them during the hottest part of the day and that's gonna give them a little bit of relief on those those days when it really does shoot up. You can either plant seeds successively every few weeks sort of in blocks.

[00:08:48] So have a blank space available for that next succession to go while the other ones are growing. Or you can plant in relays. So you're gonna replace one harvested crop with a new planting of

[00:09:03] usually started seedlings is how you would do this to kind of keep the plantings going. So those are all of your leafy greens. Number two for you is root crops, carrots, beets, radishes especially.

[00:09:15] Again these tend to like the cooler weather they grow better when it's a little bit cooler. You can keep the soil cooler with lots of mulch. So you know if you do have those spikes in temperature, it's not going to affect them as much.

[00:09:30] These can be planted just like the greens, especially the radishes. Radishes mature so quickly you can constantly sort of have a succession of those going. The carrots and the beets take a little bit longer. So you can plant those from seed every few weeks for a continuous harvest

[00:09:46] or you can just replace one crop with another one in relay. It does stay cool enough in your areas where you likely could actually get three crops. You know plant one in the spring, plant another succession in the summer which we're harvesting in the summer

[00:09:59] and then you could do another one in the late summer which would be actually a fall crop. The third one for you is bush green beans. Bush beans are very fast and mature. They have a short harvest period so usually only two weeks or so

[00:10:13] which makes them a really good candidate for succession plantings. You could actually get multiple plantings in in your climate without them suffering in extreme heat in the summertime. A lot of us can't do that even here when we're having a little bit more of a moderate climate.

[00:10:31] I can't plant green beans or grow bush green beans throughout the middle of the summertime because they won't do anything. They won't produce but in a cooler climate they absolutely will. So you could technically plant your bush green beans like every three weeks

[00:10:45] for basically a continuous harvest of green beans all summer long. Number four here is scallions or green onions. You can either do these from seed or you can start them from sets those little mini bulbs that are technically second year onions. They're very fast maturing.

[00:11:04] You're just growing them for the greens. You're not worried about them creating a bulb so they can be ready in as early as 30 days sometimes as long as 40 days. These are good candidates for succession plantings because they don't have a very long storage life.

[00:11:17] So you don't really want to be planting all of your scallions, all of your green onions all at once because they don't store very long even in the refrigerator wrapped up. They're only going to be in there for maybe a week before they start to lose some quality.

[00:11:31] 10 days and they start to get a little funky. So if you can plant every two weeks if you're doing them from seed then you will have that sort of continuous growth on all of those. You could actually space that a little bit further

[00:11:46] apart if you're using sets. You could actually do it every 30 days because those tend to hold longer in the soil because they are sort of growing that little bulb. Now alternatively you could just plant bulbs and plant them all at once

[00:12:00] and only harvest the green tops instead of pulling the whole plant. The key here to using those little sets as green onions is to plant them very closely together so they don't try to expand and create that bulb. You want them putting you know all that

[00:12:15] green growth up. You don't want them focusing on that bulb growth. So the scallions or green onions are great for successive planting through the summertime in these cooler climates. And then finally this one might sound odd but it's one where you have an advantage

[00:12:31] in the cooler climates and this is cilantro. So if you don't have the it tastes like soap gene gardeners in cooler climates have the opportunity to grow cilantro all summer long. Cilantro does not germinate well in very hot soil. It does not bear the heat very well.

[00:12:51] It wants to bolt very very quickly which is unfortunate because most of us want to use cilantro in salsa when we're getting fresh tomatoes from the garden which generally is in

[00:13:03] the middle of the summer and you know it's nice and refreshing and you want to eat it then but the cilantro generally isn't producing at that time of the year unless you are a cooler

[00:13:13] season gardener and then you actually can grow cilantro throughout the season. It can be planted every three to four weeks for a continuous harvest in those cooler places so you actually will get cilantro at the same time you have your tomatoes. No garden is complete without

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[00:15:08] Okay next up let's look at climates that are more like mine. Like I said we have about six months of frost free days. We have very warm summers, occasional extreme temperatures like what

[00:15:21] we're seeing this week but we always get a break from that it's not like it's long term and it's not the entire summer. Our average temperatures are in the upper 80s Fahrenheit so there are definitely things that we can't grow through the summer but there are some crops

[00:15:35] that can be planted multiple times and should be to increase our yield. So if you are gardening in a climate similar to mine my top five for succession plantings are as follows number one cucumbers and summer squashes okay so zucchinis yellow squash patty pan squash

[00:15:55] and then our slicing cucumbers our picklers all of them. A lot of the time in climates like mine these crops will often succumb to diseases and pests early on so continuous planting ensures a continuous albeit short-lived harvest. So oftentimes it's the only way that we can actually

[00:16:16] get a really good harvest out of some of these plants just due to pest and disease pressure. Even in healthy plants about four or so weeks into production healthy cucumber plants will

[00:16:30] still start to slow down you won't continue to get the sort of yield that you would hope to from them. So this is another really good reason why we can be successively planting

[00:16:42] our cucumber plants on all of these I actually usually will sow three times or I will plant three times so the first round is an actual planting of seedlings as soon as I get the

[00:16:55] soil warms up after our last frost and then I am planting in the soil directly from seed about two weeks later and then I'm doing that again one more time from seed about four weeks

[00:17:08] later and so this sort of staggers the harvest it staggers the maturity if for some reason I don't lose a lot of those plants to pests pressure or disease then I just have a lot

[00:17:20] more squash but those early plants are still going to slow down so this is also a way to keep the production up. Generally you want to make sure that you are planting your final

[00:17:31] round of these about two months before your average first fall frost again we're not talking about fall harvests here we're just talking about getting production during the summertime. The second one here is bush green beans right we start right after the last frost in the spring

[00:17:49] you can continue sowing about every three weeks throughout the summer into the fall there likely will be a bit of a break here because when you get these really high temperature spikes it's going to impede germination and it's also going to impede

[00:18:05] the growth of the plant and the flowering of the plant so if you have one of those high spikes or if you know all right you know the middle of July usually it's scorching hot and things

[00:18:18] don't do really well then you can take a break during that part and just kind of pick up again as the temperatures start to like give you a little bit of a break but otherwise if

[00:18:28] your climate is a little bit more moderate then you can actually just continue to to plant them you know every three weeks throughout the summertime. You can also help mitigate some of that heat problem with mulch heavy layers of mulch are actually going to keep the root

[00:18:43] zone cooler which actually helps the plant stay cooler and that actually will help with that growth and the flowering during those really hot days. The third one here is determinate tomatoes growing determinates and doing it multiple times throughout the summer is a really

[00:19:00] good way to get kind of continuous flushes of tomatoes so you can do this if you need to plant fewer plants and still get the same level of production because now you have less management

[00:19:16] you're managing fewer plants at a time but you're getting a flush of tomatoes sort of all at once. Remember determinate tomatoes are only going to produce a certain number of tomatoes they're not vining they're not continuously producing so you're going to harvest the

[00:19:32] majority of those those fruit in about a two to three week period and then that plant is pretty much done. So this is great if you do a lot of them all at once and you want a lot

[00:19:44] of tomatoes all at once if you're doing some canning or you're doing salsas or you're freezing or whatever but if you want to manage fewer plants but just get the same production well then you can do them successively. Determinates mature more quickly than

[00:19:57] indeterminate varieties and they have that shorter harvest window so you could technically plant seedlings about every 30 days beginning whenever you normally start planting your tomatoes and then just making sure that you are cognizant of when your first frost date is

[00:20:14] you can also instead of starting them from seed you can create new plants without the seed starting by taking cuttings from your productive determinate tomatoes if you're growing enough of them one or two cuttings here and there isn't going to affect your overall yield

[00:20:31] that much and it makes it much easier for you to be able to pop those in some water let them root and then pop them out into the garden. It's very simple.

[00:20:39] It's also a really great way to ward off tomato plant diseases if you are in an area that is very prone to them. In our area the early tomatoes are the ones that generally get hit with

[00:20:53] early blight, septoria leaf spot you can get some late blight in them too it just is a lot to manage so if you have one crop and it tends to okay early on they don't look all that great

[00:21:05] but you still get a little bit of production out of them well if you're growing determinate tomatoes then you can immediately go ahead and plant again in a month and then plant a third

[00:21:12] time in a month and boom you have a continuous sort of succession of tomato plants. My fourth one here is sweet corn so you can do this in two different ways you can either plant multiple varieties

[00:21:27] that have different maturity dates all at the same time so say you have a 65 day maturing corn, you have a 72 day corn, and you have an 80 day corn and you plant all three of them

[00:21:39] all at the same time. They're going to come to maturity at those different rates which a means they're not going to cross-pollinate with each other so you are going to get it true to

[00:21:47] what you planted and b it's going to be a continuous harvest a week apart or two weeks apart you're going to get your corn harvest so instead of being overloaded with all of it all

[00:21:59] at once you can have it staggered. The other way to do this is in a typical succession which is just plant the same variety but space them you know every few weeks so this is going to allow

[00:22:11] for multiple harvests through the summer instead of getting it all at once. You do need to take into consideration here though that as you get further into the summer your soil temperatures are going to be warmer which means that the seeds germinate faster so you might need to

[00:22:29] space your successions a little bit further apart as the weather warms up just to avoid some overlap. Okay so finally let's look at our warmer climate gardens those that either don't really get a

[00:22:43] frost or who have a long hot growing season and you can practically grow year round. Now I'm not talking about tropics here like actual tropics because that's outside of my wheelhouse but maybe almost tropical okay southern Florida the deep south of the U.S.

[00:22:58] or anywhere that you have long hot or very humid weather for the summer and then maybe milder weather the rest of the year. You have a few options for succession planting through the summer and then you've got even more options for what I call a split succession

[00:23:16] so this is very similar to what we do with planting for the fall garden only you're splitting up your summer successions to be able to still harvest during your warm growing season

[00:23:27] because that season is so long you don't just sow your warm season crops once and be done with it. You can plant so early and the mid-summer can get so hot that you need to split some crops up

[00:23:41] and let them take a break during the hottest period of the summer. So what can you grow in rapid succession and what can be a split succession? So the first one again is sweet corn

[00:23:51] this is a rapid succession plant it can be planted as frequently as once a week or every two weeks in these really warm areas. It can stand the heat if you can give it the moisture

[00:24:04] that it likes. You can really maximize your harvest here by planting the same variety over and over again or if you don't need that much fresh corn you can do the same type of succession that I do which is planting multiple varieties with different maturity dates at the

[00:24:19] same time but you will have a much wider planting window which means you can plant more varieties than I can because you have a longer growing window. The second succession would be cantaloupe

[00:24:34] and other musk melons now this one can stand the heat too so long as they are well mulched and they are adequately watered. You will see some slower growth like in mid-july and through

[00:24:45] August but that second succession will pick right up again after that for a quick harvest. You can either plant multiple varieties with differing maturity dates just like we do with the corn or if you have a couple of particular favorites like I do then you can plant two

[00:25:00] successive crops of these. I mean heck if you really wanted to get ambitious you could start some plants really early indoors and plant them as soon as you possibly can early

[00:25:12] in the spring and even get like three full crops out of your melons if you really wanted to. The reason that this works is most melon plants will only put on so many fruits and then they're

[00:25:23] done some will produce like two or four others will do six to eight maybe more on the really small or personal size varieties so just like with the cucumbers that we talked about the more

[00:25:34] mature the plants get the less productive they get so as they start to peter out if you can have that second succession already maturing and getting ready to produce fruit for you then you

[00:25:47] get two summer harvests of your melons. The third one is arugula and baby chard and maybe baby kale depending on just how warm you get. I don't like to do kale as much in the summer

[00:26:02] just because it's a brassica they really do struggle in the heat but arugula and baby chard for sure so we usually think of these leafy greens as cool season crops but these guys can

[00:26:14] actually stand the heat because they mature so quickly I should say they don't they don't really mature but they get to a harvestable size so quickly and because we can harvest them so young it makes them good ones to keep planting through the summer as a quick succession

[00:26:31] in those hot areas keep it well watered and you can plant every two weeks or so up until late July. Now these last two are going to be split successions so you're going to take a break

[00:26:46] from planting these during those crazy hot days in late July and August but then go ahead and continue planting them after that and the first up is cucumbers and summer squash

[00:26:58] so you can take advantage of how early the days warm up for you and get one or two successions in early on and then take a break and then wait until towards the end of August to pop

[00:27:12] the seeds directly into the ground because the soil is going to be very warm they're going to come up like that and you'll be harvesting in no time and finally snap beans okay those

[00:27:23] bush green beans midsummer in your area is going to be way too hot for these to keep producing but you can plant several successions early on through the early summer and then just like

[00:27:37] the squashes and the cucumbers you can take a break until the weather starts to break and then you can continue your successions from there take advantage of the fact that you have such mild weather in what is normally like our volatile spring you know and early fall

[00:27:51] where it's really starting to cool off but it can be very stormy or it can be super cold or it can be super hot yours tend to stretch out further than that your more extreme weather is

[00:28:00] much earlier and much later than ours so take advantage of that with some of these successions and use that summer weather to your advantage just take a break during the hottest part of the season until you can continue your successions towards the end of the summer

[00:28:18] now there are plenty of crops that will keep producing all summer long without the need for succession plantings these do fine in my area they're great in those really hot climates but for cool climate growers you will need to choose fast maturing varieties of these and

[00:28:37] more than likely you're going to get them started indoors early in order to be able to get them in the ground and get them to maturity during the summertime but these include things like okra sweet potatoes amaranth greens and grains peppers indeterminate tomatoes tomatillos

[00:28:55] eggplant malabar spinach winter squashes notice i didn't include these in with the cucumbers in the summer squashes this is because yes we harvest them in the summer not the winter and they will continue to produce all the way through into the first frost you don't have

[00:29:11] successively plant these pole beans and yard long beans and then our heat living greens mustard greens collards and mizuna there's all kinds of things that you can plant just once and let it continue to produce throughout the summer so succession planting is really good for those

[00:29:28] shorter lived plants but not every crop is a candidate try some of the ones that i suggested play around with some other ones that you think might work well in your climate you never

[00:29:39] know until you try until next time my gardening friends keep on cultivating that dream garden and we'll talk again soon thanks for listening to another episode of the just grow something podcast for more information about today's topic and to find all the ways you can get in touch

[00:29:53] with me or support the show go to just grow something podcast.com until next time my gardening friends keep learning and keep growing