Succession Harvesting Instead of Succession Planting
 (Read 500+ times)
By Clair Schwan
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A common practice in the world of vegetable gardening is to succession plant to achieve a steady supply of vegetables to harvest. It's a common practice with lettuce and greens. Succession planting allows the gardener to completely harvest a plant, knowing that others are on their way to replace what will soon be harvested to depletion.
An alternative is succession harvesting. Using this technique, instead of harvesting the entire plant, the gardener harvests portions of the plant, allowing the rest of the plant to continue to grow and produce new food for a future harvest. The advantage is that this approach requires fewer plants and less space.
Succession harvesting can be done with romaine type lettuces with ease. As the plant grows, simply harvest the outside leaves by carefully cutting at the base of each leaf. Selective harvesting like this will provide a nice bowl of salad greens from just a few plants. In response to harvesting the outside leaves, the plant will develop new leaves on the inner core and this will become your future harvest. In doing so, the plant also grows a bit taller.
After several weeks of succession harvesting, a romaine lettuce plant will have an elongated stem with rust colored stubs showing where outside leaves have been harvested. The plant will continue to grow upward, presenting additional leaves for the gardener to harvest. Given proper weather conditions, this technique eliminates the need for succession planting simply because the entire plant isn't harvested all at once, but rather several leaves at a time, thus extending the harvest in a manner that produces a continuous supply of lettuce without the need for additional plants.
Commercial growers can't take advantage of this method nearly as well as the home gardener simply because it's a bit labor intensive. Nevertheless, succession harvesting allows the gardener to grow an entire season's worth of lettuce and other greens in much less space than would normally be required for multiple plantings of the same crop harvested in the traditional "take all" method.
In climates where there is a risk of bolting due to heat, simply combine succession planting with succession harvesting. Time the plantings such that freshly matured crops are up and producing at about the time the matures ones are bolting. In the meantime, succession harvest as you normally would. Using a combination of succession planting and harvesting is effective in providing a bountiful harvest throughout the entire growing season, even with crops that are known to bolt during the heat of summer.
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Author Bio Box: Clair Schwan
 Clair Schwan is an avid gardener in his homemade greenhouse and a managing editor of the Self Reliance Exchange where vegetable gardening is recognized as important for self sufficiency as well as a means of gaining more control over our own food supply.
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