Do you struggle with too much garden produce at certain times of the year, and not enough at other times? Succession planting is the answer. In this class we will look at crop planting dates to keep the veggies coming all year long!

AdAgrA 2020: A Living Parable

<p>Do you struggle with too much garden produce at certain times of the year, and not enough at other times? Succession planting is the answer. In this class we will look at crop planting dates to keep the veggies coming all year long!</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Home Gardening

John Dysinger

Joshua Dysinger

Succession Planting

Alan Seiler

Simple Soil Science

Discouraging Thorns and Thistles

Larry Lesher

Every Seed Sown is a Harvest

Bob Gregory

Saving Seed Successfully

Renee Vandenberg

Composting & Cover Cropping

Our dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this beautiful morning.

We thank you for the encouragement we have already heard.

We ask that you would give us wisdom to make it clear and succinct.

And I pray for those who listen that they would be encouraged and empowered.

Okay, so I am going to just do a little bit of an overview on why you wanna do succession planting.

My dad will get into more of the ins and outs, especially for the summer season.

And then I'll touch on the fall and winter again at the end which is a little bit more confusing and difficult but we'll try and at least point you in some of the right direction.

You can see some succession planting in this picture, at least a couple there, the peas.

Because the classic, you can only use so much zucchini and squash in July I mean and it just seems like your eyes are always bigger when you go to like you know it's like 2 squash plants you know that's nothing but when it starts producing You know you really can't use that much so You spread your you spread your produce out through the through the season.

My dad found some funny side things there.

Zucchini car making, you got to figure out something to do with all your all your stuff and You know you're from the south when you only lock your car during zucchini season.

So another reason it's more efficient, more, yeah your garden space is used more efficiently because you're not putting everything in at once.

At least around us, it's like, I guess, late April, beginning of May, people put their garden in.

And then it grows until it's either full of weeds or gone or whatever but you know with the succession planting you don't need as much space you just plant you know a little bit half a row of lettuce and a few squash plants.

And you're, as those are coming out, you're putting more in.

And so you don't need as much space and you've got the stuff that's growing, the stuff that's in transplants keeps you eating fresh year-round so this is 1 of our you know end of May beginning of June CSA boxes and then this is 1 of our probably end of December or January boxes.

It makes the garden more manageable, which is pretty much the same as the efficiency in space, because you're not, everything's on a smaller scale because you're not putting it all out there at once which makes it just feel much more much more manageable.

And so now we're going to go into the more nitty-gritty and this is this is general guidelines.

And especially in the winter, at least our winters, have just been all over the place.

So every year is different you can't you can't count on every year being the same but we'll try and give you a good ballpark and at least give you some good overview on succession planting and try and simplify it.

So, I just wanted to emphasize a couple things that Joshua was talking about.

You know, Many of you, in fact, I know there was a class, I don't know if it's today or it was yesterday, on canning and preserving.

Many of you preserve food, and that's great, and there's nothing wrong with that.

But I think most people would agree that preserved food is not as healthy as food picked straight from the garden, right?

Isn't that, as a general rule, I think that's true.

So, you know, when you just plant a big summer garden, and then you've got all this work of canning and Preserving it's it's a lot of work all at 1 time So we do Actually very little preserving now we do applesauce We can tomatoes because we don't like to buy tomatoes in the wintertime We do freeze like our berries strawberries and blueberries, but that's hardly preserving.

And we do some peaches, but literally that's about it.

And so the point is, that's all work we don't have to do.

When it's summertime, man, we have a lot of tomato sandwiches and corn on the cob, right?

And green beans and squash and all those good things.

But come fall, we're eating broccoli and kale and, you know, all the root crops.

And in the wintertime, we've got lots of salads and cooking greens and carrots, amazing carrots.

So in many ways, it just seems simpler, right?

You just go out every day and say, okay, what's for dinner?

So that's kind of in my mind, the biggest beauty of succession planting.

To try to simplify this, what we are encouraging you to do, and just to back up a minute or for a second, Joshua was saying, you know, it's it's not an exact science.

And this is what makes what makes gardening so challenging.

And as Elliot Coleman, my kind of my gardening mentor says it's the mountain that you never summit Can you imagine for somebody who's into conquering?

This is the year we're gonna summit the mountain and you never summit it no matter how long you live every year has enough challenge to it and It's enough different that you don't get it all right.

So that can either discourage you or it can just push you on, man.

And So saying that, with all the weather changes that we have nowadays, we can give you these guidelines, but the only way to ensure that you're always going to have something ready to harvest is to do what what I call a shotgun approach.

You know you've got to if if this is you know if like for us for our winter carrots we we did experimenting in the early years and we decided August 24 was the target date for planting our winter carrots and those stay in the ground all winter.

But because every fall is different some are cold like this year.

This was a really weird year You know We had this really cold snap in the fall which really shuts down the growth of the plants and then it warmed up again, you know, and it's been warm ever since pretty much.

But so, you know, our carrots didn't size up like they I mean, they're now slowly sizing up, but they didn't get the size we wanted them to because that cold just shut them down.

So you see what I'm saying it is a little complicated but anyway let's just get into it here.

So we're going to suggest, because we're trying to simplify this, and even on our farm, commercial growing, I have 1 seeding day a week.

And that, as Joshua said, in the fall, that really is not enough, because the planting dates bunch up in the fall.

But anyway I think for a home gardener 1 day a week is good, but you just have to put it on your calendar.

And so there's some crops that you do on 7 day intervals.

And again, you know, on a home scale, you may not even want to grow all these things.

And also, we're going to try to get all these on the Adagra website.

So 7 day interval crops are mainly direct seeded crops.

I mean, we pretty much direct seed all these baby leaf lettuce, baby leaf greens, so that would be all your other baby stuff like arugula.

There's lots of Asian kinds of mizuna, tatsoi, you know, many greens that you can seed.

And these you're just growing small So you have to seed them often and these like I say are direct seeded We actually discourage direct seeding because direct seeding will discourage you if you don't have your weeds under control and that's what the next session is about.

Almost everything we do is transplanted with the exception of these.

So on this page just to kind of show you how it's set up, the first column we have the crops and the intervals.

Then the second column has some planting recommendations.

And this is first sowing, you know, we give some some guidelines for first sowing and then so up to so your first sowing in this case is 6 weeks before the last frost and Then your last sowing would be 4 weeks before the first frost does that make sense First frost in the fall and last frost in the spring.

That's and again these are averages you know it can vary a lot but this is the average last frost in the spring and the average first frost in the fall.

For us in Middle Tennessee, average last frost is April 15, and average first frost is October 20.

And you'll notice, and we won't we don't have time to talk in depth about all of these, but you'll notice Our planting recommendations for most of these and these are cool weather crops We don't recommend sowing more than 6 weeks before the last Frost in the spring and this is outdoors.

I need to also point out if you have a protected environment Like an unheated heat hoop house you can start You can push these back like at least a month So rather than 6 weeks you could go 10 weeks So the first of February is when we start seeding in earnest.

But all that stuff is gonna go in a hoop house, an unheated hoop house.

Anything going outside would be the 1st of March, would be when we're seeding it.

The only exception, I think there's 1 or 2 exceptions, Spinach, you know, in the seed catalogs, they will say as soon as the soil can be worked.

That's a famous line, you know, as soon as the soil can be worked.

Well, that can vary by months, you know, depending on the year.

But the key there is to actually work the soil in the fall.

And you just have it ready, sitting and ready to go in the spring.

And then the third column, I have some notes.

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Series

Home Gardening

Succession Planting

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Seminar 5

Growing Through the Winter

51m

Market Gardening

03 Meet the Farmer: Joshua Dysinger, Bountiful Blessings Farm

1h 3m

Starting a Market Garden

The Perpetual Harvest Hack

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06 The Backyard Garden Blueprint

59m

Market Gardening Track

The Cold Hard Truth About Winter CSA

54m

Seminars

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1h 15m

Home Gardening

2- Balancing the Home and Garden

54m

Short Course: Beginning Market Farming

Beginning Market Farming- Part 5

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Plan It, Grow It, Eat It!

58m

Sound Doctrine