Succession Planting For The Home Vegetable Garden

Succession Planting can mean several different things.  I want to talk about succession planting for the home garden - for small crops in small spaces.  Some vegetable plants produce harvest all summer and into the fall, like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, eggplants and swiss chard.  Other vegetable plants are harvestable only once and then they are all done for the season - like lettuce, beets, peas, and radishes, for example.  You harvest these vegetables when they are ready and then the plant is either gone (because you dug it up and ate it) or it is not going to flower again (like peas).
With this in mind, think about spreading that harvest time out over a month or two instead of having ALL of the harvest of ONE thing happen within a few days.
We can do this by succession planting - plant some of the seeds for a particular crop one week, then more the next week, more the week after that, etc.  By not planting the whole row of peas in one day and instead, spreading the plantings out, you will have small amounts of peas each week from late June through the end of July.
If, however, you are planning on preserving the harvest in some way (like canning or freezing) and you want the harvest to happen all at once, then plant the seeds all at once.

harvesting the salad garden