How to Use Succession Planting to Grow More Vegetables

Succession planting is a vegetable gardening technique that involves staggered plantings. This ensures that different crops are ready for harvest throughout the calendar year, rather than ripening all at once. Succession planting involves planting both warm-season crops and cool-weather crops, and it involves delaying the planting dates of similar crops so that when one harvest is exhausted, a new harvest is waiting to take its place.

By filling your vegetable garden with successive plantings, you can enjoy year-round benefits.

1. 1. Efficient use of garden space: Succession planting allows gardeners to plant a variety of fruits and vegetables throughout the year. Commercial farmers achieve something similar with crop rotation, swapping one species of plant out for another at different times of year. You can do this in your own garden.
2. 2. Fresh vegetables will be in season for longer: If you stagger your plantings, you can enjoy a steady supply of new vegetables throughout the harvest season. By the time you polish off your first harvest, a second crop will be ready for picking.
3. 3. Exposure to new types of vegetables: If you’re only used to crops produced during the summer growing season (leafy greens, sweet corn, summer squash, tomatoes), you can discover new types of produce by planning for a fall harvest—think carrots, Brussels sprouts, and kohlrabi, as well as winter crops like onions and winter squash.

If you want to enjoy fresh vegetables year-round, try implementing one of these four methods for succession planting.

1. 1. Staggered planting of the same species: This method involves planting seeds or seedlings of the same crop, spaced out by several days or weeks. Staggered planting allows plants to be at a different point of maturity at any given time. This way, when one plant has exhausted its yield, another will be ready to take its place. Try staggering species like broccoli, arugula, lettuce, spinach, cucumbers, bush beans, and peas.
2. 2. Companion planting different species: Also known as intercropping, this planting method involves planting different species of vegetables in the same garden plot or raised bed. Tomatoes and basil grow particularly well together. Onions grow well alongside leafy greens like kale, collards, and Swiss chard. One reliable intercropping method is to co-plant fast-growing crops like radishes and beans with slower growing crops like carrots and peppers.
3. 3. Different varieties of the same crop: Some plant species come in different varieties that mature at different times. If you plant them at the same time, one crop will produce its yield and a new crop from a different variety will follow a few weeks later. Tomato varieties are famous for their different maturation times. This method also works for varieties of potatoes, cauliflower, summer squash, kale, pole beans, broccoli, carrots, celery, corn, and melon.
4. 4. Crop rotation: Also known as the relay method or the harvest-and-sow method, crop rotation involves alternating warm-season crops and cool-season crops in the same plot of land. You can plant early spring vegetables like peas, radishes, and bush beans before the last frost date. They will produce in summer, and you can follow those with a planting of fall crops like eggplant, collards, and kohlrabi. You can then follow with some cold-weather crops to harvest after the first frost. Turnips, potatoes, winter squash, and rutabaga fit the bill for this. Smaller greens, like cilantro and parsley, can also grow between crops throughout the warm-weather growing season.

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