Plant all your lettuce at once and you get a wall of it for two weeks, then nothing. Succession planting, in small staggered sowings, gives you a steady supply of the crops you eat continuously.
Photo: SA, The Green Ark- Bostanie · CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
What you need
A crop you eat a little of continuously (salad greens, radishes, bush beans, cilantro)
A short row’s worth of seed every couple of weeks
A simple note of when you last sowed, so the next sowing lands on time
Almost everyone plants a whole packet of lettuce on the same day once. When it comes ready, 45–60 days later, you have more lettuce than any household could eat, half of it bolting to seed before you get to it, and then, just as fast, none at all. The fix is one of the easiest and most useful habits in vegetable gardening, and it barely costs any extra work.
What is succession planting?
Stagger the crop: a short sowing now, another in about two weeks, another after that:
Succession sowing at intervals of about two weeks extends harvest for short-DTM crops.
If you skip this, it still grows, just less well. The planner suggests it.
How it works: Sowing the same crop in batches about two weeks apart staggers when each batch matures, so the harvest arrives as a continual succession, with no single glut. It pays off only for short-DTM crops, whose quick turnaround lets several sowings ripen within a single season.
Evidence: checked against 1 source in the research-based literature.
Each small sowing matures a couple of weeks after the last, so you get a steady trickle of as much as you can use in place of one overwhelming flush. The same total amount of seed, spread across a few dates, turns a glut-then-gap into a continuous supply. For the crops it suits, it makes a big difference.
Which crops is it worth doing for?
Succession sowing pays off for fast, short-lived crops you harvest continuously and that don’t hold long once ready:
Salad greens: lettuce, arugula, spinach, mesclun.
Radishes: ready in weeks, woody if left. The textbook succession crop.
Bush beans: a single planting bears for a couple of weeks, so stagger for a longer run.
Cilantro and dill: they bolt fast in heat, so a fresh sowing every few weeks keeps leaves coming.
Skip it for long-season, one-and-done crops. A tomato, a winter squash, or a pepper bears over a long stretch from a single planting, so there’s nothing to stagger. Plant those once and let them run.
Succession works because of that gap. A radish clears the bed several times over before a pumpkin is ready to pick, so the fast crops are the ones to re-sow.
Days from sowing to first harvest, from our plant records. Each bar is the crop’s range across cultivars; where a cultivar group is named, its own range.Source: the days to harvest in each plant’s record, or a cultivar group’s own range where one is named.
Can I follow one crop with a different one?
The word has a second sense. When an early crop finishes and frees its ground, you replant that space with a new crop instead of leaving it bare. Peas or early lettuce come out in early summer; beans, or a fall crop of greens, go in behind them. Before you do, check whether the follow-on crop has time to finish. Count its days-to-maturity back from your first fall frost, exactly as the read a planting calendar guide describes. When you do follow one crop with another, mind the plant families too, so you don’t set up a rotation problem. The crop rotation guide covers that.
How do I keep a succession going?
The only hard part of succession planting is remembering to do the next sowing, so make it easy: keep a one-line note of the date you last sowed each crop, and put the next sowing in when the last one comes up. Sow small: a few feet of row at a time. Ease off the heat-sensitive crops (lettuce, cilantro, spinach) through the hottest weeks, when they bolt no matter what, and pick them back up as the season cools. A little seed and a little attention, spread out, is all it takes to trade a two-week flood for a season-long supply.
Further reading
Good places to read more about the technique on this page. The grade on each card comes from that card’s own sources.
