Basil and succession planting
The first summer veggies begin to be harvest in mid-May and we don’t finishing harvesting them until the end of October.
There is no secret sauce that allows us to be able to harvest off the same plants for over five months, instead we plant multiple successions throughout the season.
Veggies that are harvested all at once are most typically succession planted throughout the season but for us we also plant almost all of our long-season summer veggies multiple times.
Despite being able to harvest off peppers, eggplant, tomatoes and other heat-loving crops all season long, they are only at peak production for a portion of that.
They are not able to maintain a good production all throughout the season so to keep there being a consistent amount for us to harvest we plant a few times.
Genovese Basil is one of the most important crops for us to succession plant in the summer as even though it is possible to harvest off the same plants the entire time, the quality is not always what we want.
The plants grow so quickly and if we are not on top of harvesting they will go to flower. We then have to cut the plants back heavily so that they regrow again.
Even then some of the plants don’t produce nice stems of basil so planting it four times means we have great looking basil all the time.
Right now we are just starting to harvest our fourth and last succession we plant. The stems of basil have very large leaves on them and they look pristine having not dealt with the stresses that the other successions have had.
Unlike the genovese basil, the thai basil we only planted one time this year and it is doing really well. We changed varieties after two years of the plants barely being able to be harvested.
The key factor for the new variety we are growing, Thai Towers, is that it is extremely slow to go to flower. That means we don’t have to harvest all at once or plant multiple succession which is great since we only grow a little bit.
In addition to the basil, we succession plant our peppers. We can harvest off the same plants all season long but they produce the most amount of peppers in their first set.
After the first set of peppers, the next ones are smaller and much fewer in quantity. Right now we are harvesting our second planting of Jimmy Nardellos after we picked all the ripe ones from the first one.
We still will be able to harvest some from the first planting but it would not be enough for the market.
Succession planting also helps limit the risk if the first planting fails for some reason there is more growing and it isn’t a complete loss for the season of that crop.
