The Importance of Succession Planting For Generating Your Food Supply

A little planning goes a long way

As the spring unfolds there are a lot of early gardening decisions to be made. Notes on Substack (and other parts of the internet) has exploded with joyful pictures of little seedlings popping up in starter trays. It’s an infectious pass-time to plant seeds and then check them every five minutes waiting for germination to begin.

There are as many ways of gardening as there are gardeners out there, so first let me start out with - do what makes your heart happy when it comes to your garden. I’m simply sharing some of the things that have shaped my gardening seasons and plans over the last thirty years of growing food to help sustain my family. But there is no one right way, and definitely few wrong ways, of approaching this.

Tabula Rasa Fever

The biggest challenging in the spring is looking at all those empty beds or open garden space and rushing to plant if full instantly.

Tabula Rasa - a clean slate

Bare soil and the urge to empty packets of seeds everywhere begins (Source: Sue Senger - Canva Pro)

Each spring offers the chance to do things differently in the garden. To implement the lessons learned from past seasons. To enrich your food supply with new colors and flavors and nutrition. And for me, to experiment with something new I’ve been wanting to try.

Patches of bare soil need attention quickly in the spring. This year it seems my chickens (who overwinter in the garden) have created a lot of extra work for me by clearing off most of the beds leaving the soil bare. I’ve got some challenges with this. On the one hand I need to get that soil covered or planted asap. On the other, I am re-designing my garden (again), and so I’ll be moving rows and soil around to accommodate some new raised beds and features I’ve been dying to create.

But the key thing to remember in spring, especially in the springtime of ever-rising food prices, is food supply and flow.

The temptation to plant a garden full in spring can override our very real need to create a meaningful supply of food, even on a small scale.

Food supply riddles

This isn’t a question of not planting up your garden space. Creating meaningful food supply is about understanding how you eat and what can make a difference to your health and nutrition.

For example, if you are only buying one head of lettuce and some mixed greens each week at the grocery store, then it makes no sense whatsoever to be emptying the package of lettuce seed into your garden on the first sunny day.

Instead the idea is to create a flow, a supply, of lettuce and greens from your garden. Instead of emptying those seed packets, start to think and plant based on your weekly supply with enough extra to account for some loss or slowness of growth, or sharing with family and friends.

(Source: Sue Senger, Canva Pro)

So in our hypothetical example, the idea would be to plant one square foot of lettuce (5 lettuce clusters per foot) and one square foot of mixed greens (spaced in the shape of a 9-dot dice) each week. Now instead of being overwhelmed with lettuce arriving and maturing at all the same time, you’ve planned for your weekly salad needs arriving at a pace you can easily consume it.

Interestingly, you can do the same with heat loving plants too if you have the indoor space to make this work.

I just planted one black seedling tray with starters for a small subset of the heat lovers I will need later in the season. Normally I would be planting a whole tray of tomatoes, one of peppers, one of cucumbers and squashes, etc. But this first weekend of seeding, I have just taken one tray and set of starters and planted a few cherry tomatoes, my fastest growing peppers (Italian red and Marconi purple), my favorite thin eggplants (Ping Tung, Diamond), and a few of my own cucumbers. It’s one tray with 8 of each plant type divided among the types: 8 cherry tomatoes, 8 eggplants, 8 peppers, 8 cucumbers.

I will have to keep these plants growing indoors while I am doing my other seeding in the coming weeks. But the advantage of starting a subset of heat lovers early is that (in theory) they will be ready to be flowering and setting fruit come June when they go outside (if not sooner) while my main season heat lovers will be just getting started growing. Just like with the lettuce, this gives me a better flow of food and some early treats.

If you want to try this too, it’s best to choose your earliest and fastest maturing heat lovers for the the start-early tray. The early maturing types tend to be the most rewarding and responsive to growing in the margins of the seasons.

I’ve also set out a tray of cold season seeds in my little greenhouse to give me an indicator of when it’s warm enough inside to plant more things. Broccoli, mustards, arugula, lettuce - these are the plants that can germinate with warm days and cold nights. This is my first year with my little homemade greenhouse. I’m not yet sure of the timing, which I will have to learn by experimenting. I have some potted herbs that are growing inside already - that’s a great sign.

Write it down!

How do you know which plants will give you great early results? WRITE IT DOWN.

Keeping a garden journal is the absolute best way to know about timing, successes and failures right in your very own garden. No one is a better expert about your garden than you!

I’ve written all about the critical importance of a garden journal before. If you missed this, you can read about it here:

This is the time of year when my garden journal pays dividends. Did I start my tomatoes at the end of March or the end of April last year? When did the bees arrive? Was it an early or late spring? How does the weather I’m seeing now relate to what I’ve seen in the past and how did that affect garden start up?

I am on a migratory bird route, so I also like to time spring by the birds. Yesterday the first wren showed up in my yard garden. The flocks will be arriving soon as it warms up and the dawn chorus will erupt in harmonies only spring can bring.

I believe you can only truly know your garden by tracking these patterns over time, and by connecting your actions to those of the natural world around it. It is the part of gardening that heals our soul, rather than just nourishes our bodies.

So the season has begun and the promise of bounteous nutritious food is just thirty days away.

Happy gardening my friend!

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The Naturalized Human brings together the science and human experience of the mind-body-food connection. I hope you stick around and become part of this community seeking to understand how the food we eat, and the environments we live in, impact everything about our minds and bodies.