Succession Planting Vegetables

Looking to find some succession planting examples? Succession planting vegetables is an excellent way to extend your harvest and make the most use of the space you have.

Reader Contribution by Karin Eller
Updated on August 9, 2023
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by AdobeStock/epiximages
Looking to find some succession planting examples? Succession planting vegetables is an excellent way to extend your harvest and make the most use of the space you have.

There are as many reasons as varieties of vegetables and herbs for successive plantings. A short definition of succession planting is the resourceful use of time and space in your garden. An example of efficient use of space is that your garden is 8×10. You plant the basics, tomatoes, peppers, spring onions, and maybe lettuce. Once the plants have finished producing the garden is done. That wonderful space that had lettuce and onions you harvested earlier in the season can be used to plant carrots or beets and beans. An example of time restriction is you cannot plant another type of vegetable because it will not mature before frost. A little bit of research on vegetables and problem solved. Timing can be everything in the garden. These are just basic ideas but let’s take this successive planting idea a few steps further.

People that preserve the garden harvest can plant to complement their endeavors. Plan your garden so that when you harvest lettuce, plant cilantro for salsa. The cilantro will be ready to use when the tomatoes ripen, and your beautiful aromatic coriander won’t become coriander.

Successive planting throughout the gardening season will also provide late blooming nutrition for pollinating friends. Many times I have been in my garden and observed pollinators on late peas.

How many times have you looked at a seed catalogue and wanted to plant something different, but there isn’t any space. Now, you do. There is plenty of time to plant shorter season transplants and seeds for your garden.

Many times we have planted zucchini and all the plants become lunch for the squash beetles. I don’t like to use any type of insecticides in my garden. Because I use compost, I do not want chemicals leeching into my black gold and killing all the good microbes in the soil. We solved this problem by planting zucchini from seed on July the fourth. The beetles have run their course and I have a wonderful zucchini harvest when no one else does.

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