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How to Plan Your Succession Plantings for a Bountiful Harvest All Season Long
206 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of Hort Culture, we talk about succession plantings for your farm and home. Succession planting refers to several planting methods that increase crop availability during a growing season by making efficient use of planting dates, space, and variety selections. By using succession plantings concepts and practices you will maximize your harvest and minimize your waste. We share some tips and tricks on how to plan, prepare, and execute your succession plantings to get the most out of your production efforts! Whether you have a large farm or a small backyard garden, succession plantings can help you enjoy more fresh produce throughout the growing season.
Publication ID-128 Home Vegetable Gardening in Kentucky
Gardening Seasons/Succession Planting (audio)
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to hort culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
Candle Burning Techniques: A Historical Insight
00:00:17
Speaker
All right, I've got a question for you all. Tell me one cool thing you've learned today, but I want to go first. Okay. Okay. Mine is that did you know that dipped candles
00:00:29
Speaker
burn more evenly and slowly than molded candles. Did you know that? Brett, did you know that? A historical reenactor pioneer woman once told me that as a child on a field trip and I believe her. Was it a dream or was she a pioneer woman on the way? It was a dream for me, a dream come true. Sounds like a fond memory, Brett.
Innovative Solutions During Power Outages
00:00:54
Speaker
Brett, tell me one cool thing that you've learned lately.
00:00:57
Speaker
One thing that I've learned lately, but it has to be cool specific thing. Oh, okay. Well, it's not something I've learned, but while we had our power out here in the, in the bluegrass state for a little while, I figured out a way to heat water and I have a little battery powered pump to make hot showers, even when the power was out. Cause we have electric water heater. And so that was kind of a fun little experiment.
00:01:26
Speaker
Wow, you're just a prepper over there. Nobody come to my house because you are not welcome there. Ray, what's one cool thing you've learned lately? Well, I have a related story since we're on a weather theme. Apparently here in Kentucky, we had lots of power outage across the state.
00:01:46
Speaker
Here as many of you guys know if you're listening locally But I had a sump pump area and I was very worried because the pump in that sump area and my finished fully finished basement Is on all the time. It's very active
00:01:59
Speaker
you know, pumping water out of my basement. Well, when the power went off, the water started to quickly rise. And I remembered the old days of siphoning gas out of farm trucks to put in other farm trucks. And I thought, hmm, I have a hill just outside of my basement. So I spent a lot of time taking a water hose and creating a siphon to consistently and constantly pump water out of that sump area with sands electricity, no electricity.
00:02:24
Speaker
but it pumped continuously and kept things dry. But that's not a very comfortable thing to do when you have to get up every hour on the hour and check that all through the night for a couple of nights. That got old real quick, but yeah, we made it work through the power outage. Necessity is the mother of invention. Your sump. My lovely, unpowered sump. What about you, Josh?
What is Succession Planting?
00:02:52
Speaker
Well, this is unfortunately not on the theme of things you learn when the lights go out. Oh, man. But yeah, that link you sent, I had never seen that plant maps thing before. Do you know what I'm talking about? That I sent? That who sent? Yeah. Somebody sent it. It has to do with, like, you can put in your zip code and get all kinds of information, aside from just your hardiness zone. But like. Oh, yeah. First last frost date, all that
00:03:20
Speaker
A bunch of cool information comes up. Anyway, that's my idea of cool. I have apparently ignored said information. Josh just led us straight into the topic of today, which is succession planting. It sounds like Josh.
00:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, inadvertent. You inadvertently accidentally transitioned us very well into the topic today, which is indeed succession planting.
Complexity and Importance of Succession Planting
00:03:43
Speaker
And I don't know about you guys, but the thing about succession planting to me, number one thing is, you know, I asked why are you doing that first and homeowners will have a different take on it almost every single time than a
00:03:55
Speaker
market gardener or for-profit gardener. But the thing about succession planting is it involves a lot, lots of charts that are very geo-specific to your location. Did you guys find that to be the case with succession plantings? Because it involves a lot of numbers, a lot of dates, a lot of timing. Sure. Yeah. Like all planting is, right?
00:04:19
Speaker
Yes, for the most part, yeah. I think it can be as complicated or as simple as you want. I like that, yes. But yeah, my wife, and now several of her friends actually, make fun of me because if there's an opportunity to make a spreadsheet for anything, to say that I will leap at the opportunity. Are you a big pivot table guy?
00:04:45
Speaker
Oh, I love, I love spreadsheets. I love them. This is one of those good ones where you can use that. You can use it for that. What were you going to say, Lexus? I was going to ask you if you like to use pivot tables. Oh yeah.
00:05:01
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, what, what I was getting on was, uh, when Ray was mentioning location as being so succession planting, right? For those of you who are like, am I, do I actually know what I'm talking, what they're talking about here is when you're planting the same crop more than one time in a season, because, um, you know, either it's a one and done type of cut, like there's some types of lettuce, right? Where you're cutting one head and that plant is done. So you're planting more so that you have a consistent supply.
00:05:30
Speaker
And then there's other plants that maybe die out certain times of the year because of weather or because of disease issues. And so you're planting that more than one time so that you have a consistent supply of whatever crop that that is. So most of you probably gleaned that just from the name, but just to clear things up a little bit, succession planting. And we see that a lot, no matter, like Ray said, if you're a homeowner growing some lettuce or if you're,
00:05:58
Speaker
you know, growing for profit and growing cut flowers or vegetables or something like that. And our audience may be, you know, it may be that you're a homesteader type or you just have a home vegetable garden planting or you may be more of a commercial horticulture operation.
00:06:17
Speaker
But almost, I'll talk for a second just about my experiences with homeowners, is that, I don't know about you all, but it's a tough sell with homeowners in a lot of cases. When I talk about succession plantings with them, for my spring gardening classes, I can usually have a good crowd. But after they get that one, you know, sometimes long season crop over, when we think about long season crops like tomatoes versus lettuce, tomatoes are longer season crop, they're done. It's hot.
00:06:43
Speaker
The crop is finishing up July, August, somewhere's in there and they're done. It's a tough sell for homeowners. In some cases for me to say, hey, you've gotten, you put all this hard work into this spring and summer crop. Let's do a fall crop. And sometimes they give me a little pushback on that. And that's where the differentiation for me is that I see a big difference between commercial operators that are really trying to maximize their time and
00:07:08
Speaker
and they're valuable space like in high tunnels. They're just different crowds and that's fine. Both camps are great to work with, but they're just different. Based on your objectives, so I guess my question to this group here today is, those on the podcast is,
00:07:25
Speaker
You know, what are your objectives for succession planting? Alexa sort of gave us a definition that you're following one crop up another of some kind, but I guess you have to start with that. What's your objectives? And homeowners tend to be different than commercial growers. I think, I think for me, the question is whether you have a compelling reason to want fresh product coming out consistently.
00:07:50
Speaker
And so what I mean by that is, I mean, of course, everybody wants fresh product coming out consistently. But if you are primarily growing tomatoes to can those tomatoes, you might just want to do one big crop of tomatoes, harvest them all at once, have all the bulk of your work done in that window of time. But conversely, Alexis gave the example of the lettuce.
00:08:16
Speaker
I think that that's one where you don't want to necessarily have all your lettuce produced all at once or your herbs or something like that. You want those things to happen and unfold across several different weeks. More to the point of the commercial side of things, if you were to show up to a farmer's market one time with a table full of products and then the next week you're completely out of everything and you don't have anything the rest of the season, then you're not going to build much of a following with your customer base.
00:08:46
Speaker
because they'll know that you just kind of go all at once and then you're done for the year. And so to me, that's one of the big questions is, do you want or need to have a good reason to have fresh product coming out consistently across the year? And with the home gardeners, if you're just doing it for like that flash of spring vibe and getting outside and planting stuff, that's great. Go off, do that.
00:09:11
Speaker
But for folks who are a little more interested in having a consistent supply of food out of that garden, it is something that you're going to need to think about. And so that for me is the, do you need to have this stuff coming out all the time? And when people are getting started with farmer's markets, they're getting started with some of these direct markets where you don't necessarily have to have stuff available consistently, but your customers would like you to. The first year they sometimes learn the hard way that
00:09:35
Speaker
they are going to need to continually plant and seed things in order to have a steady supply. Yeah, that's a learning curve there, particularly with that one, especially if you're going from home production to for-profit production, that continual planting schedule is one of the learning curves that we see a lot of times.
Impact of High Tunnels on Succession Planting
00:09:54
Speaker
And there's something else going on here in Kentucky and I know in other parts of the
00:09:58
Speaker
the country as well but you know usually when I think about succession planting one of the first things that I think about is managing dates of when I either seed a transplant or do a direct seeding of a crop in place is I'm managing seeding dates it doesn't always work out perfect
00:10:16
Speaker
but seeding dates. But here in Kentucky we're getting a lot more things like low tunnels and high tunnels and that's changing the landscape of succession planting in Kentucky and that's an interesting thing if we could talk about that sometime today because it's really backing up in the spring. It's given us a few weeks in the spring extra and a few weeks in the fall extra but it's really allowing for some interesting scenarios for succession planting but it goes back to planting dates
00:10:44
Speaker
If you look at some of our materials, a lot of times I'll refer commercial producers to our actually our home gardening manual here in Kentucky because it's got some really good charts that will say earliest safe planting dates for central Kentucky for this crop. And then it'll have on the other side of that latest safe planting dates for a crop such as like tomato. So you have the early date and the late date to get that in the ground to safely on average get a crop from that
00:11:15
Speaker
that whatever you're planting, tomatoes, corn, whatever. But high tunnels are really changing that. They're really making some interesting situations where you can get more crops in. If you're a market gardener, that's pretty exciting. So Ray's talking about planting date, AKA, when you're putting that transplant or your direct seeding into the soil. But for a lot of people who are going to do seeding and grow their own transplants,
00:11:43
Speaker
You need to look at another date, and we're throwing a bunch of these at you, but it's days to maturity. And so most of your seed packets are going to have that on there. If not, that's something that's easily Google-able. But your days to maturity means from when that seed essentially hits the soil until you are harvesting that crop.
00:12:05
Speaker
whether, again, and we're talking about pretty much any crop, whether it's vegetable, flowers, whatever that is. And so that's something you think of. And you'll look at that as well for that planting day. So if you know that you can plant out here in central part of the state, we say that Derby Day, you can plant and be safe from frost. That's not always true, but it's kind of a good rule of thumb.
00:12:30
Speaker
And so if your day's maturity and your seed packet says you need to start these four weeks before your last frost, you're just going to count back from that Derby day, which is the first weekend of May. So then that means you're going to start seeding the first weekend of April. And so that's also something that you have to keep in mind of is just looking at those days to maturity.
00:12:52
Speaker
And different cultivars have different days of maturity. So not every zucchini or whatever it is is created equal. Some of them have, you know, there's some sweet corns that are 70 days to maturity. There's others that are 100 days. Same with sunflowers. You can get them at 50 days or 100 days. And so looking at that can help
Maximizing the Growing Season
00:13:12
Speaker
you with that succession as well.
00:13:14
Speaker
Tomatoes are a good example of that. And that's a great point in Lexus, like early girl versus something like a better boy variety of tomatoes. There's a big difference in some of the crops and we're not even manipulating dates there. We're just working within the varieties. Even if you plant two different varieties on the same date, some of those will be separated by several days to a few weeks. So it's pretty, it's pretty cool. That's a great point. And I think when, when folks are kind of champing at the bit to get into the garden, they're looking at that early window.
00:13:42
Speaker
and they're looking for what's the first possible day that I can get these in the ground. And I think succession planting asks you to take a step back and say, okay, that's the earliest I can get them in the ground. And I'm going to put some of those things in the ground at first, but surprise, surprise to many home gardeners and others, there's actually a whole growing season that comes after that first date and is capped at the end by the last date that you can do stuff. And so,
00:14:10
Speaker
It's acknowledging that, yeah, you can get your thing, your crops in that first window for sure. And you almost always want to do that for excitement, for markets, for everything. But succession means there's something that comes after that. Is that right, Ray?
00:14:24
Speaker
Yeah, and when I'm working with growers, I mean, there's a crop here and there that you can do. And some crops do great. There's some crops that are more appropriate for the spring, like peas. There's some crops that do great in warm weather, sweet corn, squash, tomatoes. And I try to stress, especially on the homeowner side, to really take a look at the fall growing season. Number one, we have great technology now that's fairly affordable for home gardeners like low tunnels.
00:14:50
Speaker
and the row crop covers that are just, you can purchase those based on the qualities of the row cover and based on what temperature you want to maintain within reason. But some crops, is it not the case that some crops like broccoli and cool season crops, they taste so much better in the fall?
00:15:09
Speaker
or during the cool growing season, they're almost like a completely different product. If you plant some of these things later in the season, it's not as common in Kentucky to plant crops I know in the fall. And we have some gardeners that do that, though, and they just spread the word on how awesome it is for some of these crops.
Adapting to Weather Conditions
00:15:29
Speaker
They just do better in the cooler months. Shout out to all the fall gardeners out there. There you go. They're the ones. They know something. They do know something. You guys are the real ones.
00:15:38
Speaker
Yep. They're the ones dedicated for the long haul. They are. But in most of those fall gardeners that I've met, they're also spring gardeners. I think, would they fall into the hardcore category of home gardeners? I don't know, but they are the ones that have planting schedules and bread. They probably use pivot tables as well, I bet. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good discussion. I like Alexis's point that
00:16:04
Speaker
Now the variability within like certain crops I mean you can really manipulate that on the on the garden crop side but I mean is that true also in the flower world and other other plant world beyond vegetables is that the case as well.
00:16:20
Speaker
I mean for flowers for sure. So, you know, sunflowers are the easiest to talk about where most people who are wanting a consistent supply of sunflowers are planting a certain set every every week, really. So if they know that they're going to make, you know, 10 sunflower bouquets every week and they need a minimum of 50 plants, they may
00:16:40
Speaker
put out 60 seeds and every week they put out, you know, 60 seeds so that they have enough for those, you know, 50 stems of sunflowers every week, you know, starting early. But one thing that we haven't really mentioned yet, which can play into this, if you've tried succession planting,
00:16:59
Speaker
and you've not had the best luck with it. So let's say you tried to put sweet corn as a warm season crop, right? We think of it as a summer staple, 4th of July, all that jazz.
00:17:12
Speaker
it means it usually will do better as being planted in nice warm soils. And so that's one thing that if you're saying, oh, well, I put in my sweet corn in April, and then I put in another round of succession in May, and I got those, they both, I had sweet corn at the exact same time. My April didn't come in any earlier than my May. And that is very weather dependent. Ray, you said you'd had some,
00:17:41
Speaker
issues with that as well. How about you? Oh absolutely. We talk a lot about garden math and then we have people come back from our programs and like we done your garden math smart guy and we planted things three weeks apart and they came in all at the same time or they came in three weeks apart from one another. You know peas are a good example of that and certain crops under certain growing conditions, peas for example, they won't
00:18:05
Speaker
germinate in the soil until a certain temperature is reached. You may do an early planting of peas and they'll sort of lie dormant until that temperature is reached. Well, you've planted another succession planting of peas in the spring a couple weeks later or whatever and they end up growing at the same time. On the flip side of cool season crops, if you're talking about warm season crops, tomatoes are a good example that I use tomatoes in a lot of my examples.
00:18:34
Speaker
Seems like late planted tomatoes if I've had an early failure or if I've had an early planted tomatoes They don't really kick into high gear until the weather gets bright sunny and warmer and boy They just catch up with each other and they end up stacking right on top of each other and some people have gotten smart to that they've actually combined concepts that we're talking about today not only planting dates and
00:18:57
Speaker
but to ensure that they have a spread on something like tomatoes that you guys, they overwhelm you. When you have tomatoes as home gardeners or market gardeners, you have an avalanche of red gold. It is everywhere, so some people have stacked concepts.
00:19:14
Speaker
They not only manipulate planting dates, but they manipulate varieties within that to really get a spread. And it really boils down to your individual operation, weather conditions, and some of that will vary year to year. But after a while, you get a pretty good handle on it. Is that what you were saying, Brett? You've done some of that succession planting. Have you had any of those experiences, just observations when planting different crops and them not doing what you thought they would do?
00:19:41
Speaker
According to the label, it's almost like they don't read the label, that crops don't. Plants don't read the label? Come on, crops. There's certainly an element of a slingshot effect of the hot weather, where three weeks of growing in April and May is the equivalent of a week in June and July, just time-wise. Days are longer. They get a three-week head start and they end up a week earlier. That type of thing definitely happens
00:20:12
Speaker
As I'm you know, as I'm as we're talking through this, I wonder, maybe let's say that let's say that I wanted to be a salad guy, you know, I want to like become a market vendor who sells salads, who sells lettuce. Can you all just walk me through a recommendation or a potential recommendation of how I might think about setting up my successional seeding and planting for something like lettuce?
Strategies for Consistent Crop Supply
00:20:38
Speaker
Oh gosh, with lettuce, first thing I think of is heat because that's a short term crop. I mean, it's a flash crop that comes on pretty hard and quick, but it behaves so differently and the quality is so different in cool season months versus warm season months. And a lot of our local high tunnel growers grow lettuce for that very purpose-bred and they do market that for profit.
00:21:00
Speaker
And they really had to manage the growing environment carefully with things like, you know, putting lime coating on their structures, if it's a greenhouse structure, or using shade cloths to sort of manage temperatures so that you don't get like bitter lettuce and a poor quality product. That's the biggest thing with a crop-like lettuce when you're trying to stack it out. Yes, it'll grow. So when might I think about starting and how would I figure out that? Oh, goodness.
00:21:27
Speaker
So just to clarify, your lettuce is a lot of those salad greens, spinach, kale, things like that. Collards are cool season crops. So that's why Ray was saying.
00:21:39
Speaker
When they're, they get hot, they bolt, which is what we call them going to flower. And then they focus all their energy into flowering. And then we don't mean they run out of the greenhouse. They might, if it gets too hot, but trying to climb up to the side. So if I'm looking at wanting to become a salad vendor at the market, I know that my windows of time, I'm going to sell lettuce for the most part, unless I'm going to very manipulate my environment. Like Ray was describing.
00:22:08
Speaker
is going to be in the spring and in the fall when it's cool. So what I would do as a grower, I'd get my seeds, I'd get the cultivars that I want, and I'm going to look at those days to maturity as well as a lot of the times they will tell you the temperatures for germination. And so then I'm going to pull up. One thing we haven't actually mentioned yet is
00:22:30
Speaker
So here in Kentucky, we have a mes what we call mezzanet stations and so those are located in all and I think every county in the state and they're Would you say most most most of them? Okay, so there's some where's one close enough to you like a weather and other environmental factors?
00:22:48
Speaker
Yeah, and it measures soil temperatures. It also gives you history. And so you can look in there and see like what your current temperatures are as well as what they were last year. So you can kind of say, all right, they should be around this tent by April 1st or something.
00:23:04
Speaker
unless you have an 81 degree day on March 1st like we did this year. So I'm gonna look at that and it's gonna tell me, okay, I can plant so many weeks before frost and I figure out that I can seed my lettuce directly into the garden on, we'll say March 1st. And then what I'm going to do is then about every two weeks, I'm going to seed up until
00:23:33
Speaker
the soils are going to get too warm. So again, I'm going to look back on some data and say, oh, wow, we, we really tend to get too warm by May, you know, fifth. So I know that I need to kind of stop seeding every two weeks around the middle of April. Does that sound right to you guys, Josh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds good. I mean, I think that, that idea that you're kind of sketching out, okay, what's the earliest I can go and what's the latest I can go?
00:24:02
Speaker
and then filling in the gaps in between those spots with planting dates. And that means, you know, for the home gardener, if you've ever like, let's say carrots is another is a good example. If you've ever planted carrots, and let's say you have 100 carrot seeds to plant for the year, if you put them all out on that first date, and they all come up, well, on the day that they mature, or the week that they mature, you're going to have 100 carrots to eat.
00:24:28
Speaker
Whereas if you could have spaced that out into three or four plant individual planting dates, that means you're going to have 20 carats, you know, a three or four pound bag, maybe depending on what, how, what, what age they are when you harvest them. Um, another thing too, I think as you get more advanced or you get more risky or looking for thrills in the garden, you can also think about, you know, those, those planting dates, their guidelines in many cases, their conservative guidelines.
00:24:56
Speaker
you can think about rolling the dice on putting 10 seeds out a week early, putting 10 seeds out a week late in case the weather's weird, things get strange, who knows? And that's where you can then, oh, guess what? You know, if you're at market, we had a small crop of lettuce come in early. I can be the first person to market with this lettuce. Boom. How's that first salad of the year tasting?
00:25:18
Speaker
Delicious and local baby. All of your eggs are not in one basket if you're doing succession planting. I guess from an economic standpoint you are spreading the risk. Definitely managing that risk. Yeah and I like that anytime. You know we're talking about how to do succession planting and some of you guys think a lot about marketing also. I know Brett and Josh and we think about it as well. You know we're talking mainly about production
00:25:44
Speaker
But it's interesting, one of the reasons that I think succession plantings from a commercial standpoint in Kentucky is such a great topic is where we are at as a state and where consumer education is. And I'll give an example that we have people coming in now that we have more high tunnels in the state of Kentucky and our
00:26:07
Speaker
growing season has gotten longer from a marketing standpoint we have people coming in they're still asking for crops that like a tomato in January February that's just not feasible if it's locally grown or if it was feasible the inputs would be so high it wouldn't make economic sense but succession plantings I think we could still do as a state a much better job with succession planting small growers could do a great job and really realize
00:26:32
Speaker
an economic gain there and meet consumer demands better because consumers, you know, they, they come and they want to buy when they want to buy. Even if it's out of season, they're kind of disappointed and that's a missed sales opportunity. But that's one of the reasons here in Kentucky, we're a transition state. We're not North. We're not South. We're sort of in between.
00:26:51
Speaker
But that's one of the reasons I'm interested in this topic is that if you're a commercial producer, you can possibly generate additional revenue by having succession plantings. Not only that, but you're meeting more consumer demand. And one of you guys mentioned earlier about, you know, keeping consumers coming back, you know, people that are looking to purchase goods coming back. And that's all part of the game, marketing. The marketing aspect of this conversation today is real important to me.
00:27:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think something that as season extension has come up and grown in popularity over the last decade and a half, two decades, and particularly over the last 10 years, one of the things that's been in the back of my mind is, are you taking advantage of the current non-extended season? Are you taking full advantage of that as a producer? Do you have things coming out consistently across that whole period of time? And I think in general, the answer is often no.
00:27:47
Speaker
And our goal here is not necessarily to just squeeze every drop of production out of the soil that we possibly can. You know, we talked in our last podcast about soil and I think, you know, we all have a soft spot in our hearts for it. But it is, there is this whole window of seasonality. And if you're going to be selling seasonal food, taking advantage of that whole seasonal window is an important one, an important consideration for
00:28:15
Speaker
because if you don't have product coming out and you're trying to sell it and you aren't gonna have income coming in. Yeah, spreading the cash flow. Cash flow will kill a business, so it's good to have it.
00:28:25
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I just hate when a consumer comes and sometimes, you know, it's just the way that it is. A consumer comes into art. We have an indoor farmers market, which sometimes confuses for a local indoor farmers market here in central Kentucky in my county. There is one that is established very good. It has products such as eggs and meat and they sell all things local in this market. It's got like 400 local products in this tiny little farmers market, along with lots of fresh things. But because it is an indoor farmers market, it sometimes messes with people's expectations of
00:28:55
Speaker
what they should be able to buy because they can go to Walmart any time of the year or shouldn't mention names, any box store. We're very lucky here in the United States that we have access to fresh fruits and vegetables for the most part year round. But when you're purchasing local, consumers come into that indoor farmer's market expecting the same thing. And we just don't think about, oh, it is truly a local product.
00:29:22
Speaker
And that ties into succession. And it's near and dear to me because we do have an indoor farmers market. We do have people coming in there in January saying, you know, where's your tomatoes? And we're like, well, they truly are, you know, local within a given range around central Kentucky here. So we don't have any at this time. Maybe that'll change in the future because protected agriculture, which AKA greenhouses fully heated,
00:29:45
Speaker
you know, supplemental lot systems, the whole thing, maybe someday they'll be able to purchase these warm season crops year round in Kentucky. I don't know. That's the dream. And that's the revenue spread there. But it's a great topic for me today. Josh, have you have you messed around with the succession planting stuff much? No, not lately. But I mean, I guess kind of in what way? I was just curious if there's any things that you feel like you've tried and they didn't work or they did work or
00:30:13
Speaker
I know you have some background working on market farms and. Yeah. I mean, I guess I would say one thing to kind of, and this is more along the lines of, you know, tracking the days to maturity with your variety and variety specific concerns is one thing to make sure of is that, you know, certain varieties of tomatoes are determinate, you know, kind of all at once and then they're done and some are indeterminate.
00:30:37
Speaker
And indeterminate has a little bit of built-in spreading of the harvest. And that's just something to be aware of when you're planting. Expect your indeterminate crops to be sticking around in that space and producing for a little bit longer.
Disease Management in Succession Planting
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, so the determinants are the short, bushy ones you traditionally find at a big box store. And the hybrid tomatoes tend to be, we call those hybrids,
00:31:04
Speaker
There's exceptions to every rule, but sure. And they had that blast of production for like an eight to 10 week period where it's just going. Yeah. Alex just said canning. That's what comes to mind for those. And if you have, you know, large customer base that's looking for an indeterminate Alexis that a lot of heirloom tomatoes are indeterminate. They're the long viney. They can't really hold themselves up almost at all. Is that right?
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, you've got a steak gum and yeah, all of our heirlooms are gonna be. Determinant is pretty much been bred in for, you know, canning purposes and these large farms that are using machine harvests and things like that. One thing that I kinda mentioned earlier but wanted to hit on again really quick was, you know, if you're like, oh, well, I don't necessarily have to have a ton of product,
00:31:58
Speaker
or even if you do need a lot of product, one way to cut back on sort of the amount of sprays or something that you might have to do for both insects and disease is to have succession plant.
00:32:11
Speaker
I'm the person who always answers the flower questions on here because I deal a lot with flowers, but zinnias are always one that come to mind. By August, usually those first ones that you have put in, so you put in zinnias, they do not handle cold weather, they do not handle cold soils, and so you'll put them in Kentucky usually around the first week of May.
00:32:32
Speaker
By August, sometimes earlier in July, depending on what our humidity looked like here in the state, those plants are just about done. They have really bad disease pressure on them. They've got some insects to Japanese beetles that probably hit them at least once or twice this season. So those are one of those things that you can actually
00:32:54
Speaker
plant in May, you know, you put your first succession in and then you can even go in and direct seed because the soil is warm enough around the first week of June or closer to the first week of July, depending on what the weather's been and plant those again. And so then you get nice, fresh, healthy plants coming up at this right as your first ones are starting to die. And so you don't have to sacrifice any quality with them. And you have that consistency.
00:33:23
Speaker
of having those plants available. So, you know, doing that, we always say tomatoes, but from a tomato's point of view, it could be blight. So those early tomatoes usually by mid July, early August have been hit with a layer and early blight sometimes both at the exact same time and they don't look good. They're not producing. So instead of us pushing fertilizer and spraying the crap out of them, we could do another succession of them.
00:33:48
Speaker
rip out those old ones and put something else put a cover crop in their place if you're if you're needing some soil build or put something quick in their place so you kind of have to think about how you're rotating your fields you know do you have time and do you have more space to put that other other succession
00:34:06
Speaker
And someone mentioned soil earlier, and that was a big discussion. And the thing about succession planting is we're pushing the soil, right? Where anytime you take off biomass that's not going back naturally into the soil, we're taking off a nutrient profile. Out of the soil, different crops have different nutrient profiles that you're taking off. So this concept of rotating different crops becomes very much more important.
00:34:34
Speaker
in succession planting, but not only that, you know, Alexis just mentioned organic matter. You have to manage that much more carefully. You have to manage the fallow period. If you're pushing your soil hard with three crops a year and you're taking off a lot of biomass in whatever form that takes, at some point that soil literally is
Sustaining Soil Health and Managing Succession Planting
00:34:57
Speaker
going to need to rest. You're going to need to replenish the nutrient profile. You're going to need to, you know, check your organic matter.
00:35:04
Speaker
And you're going to have to manage all these things more carefully. And that's one of you guys mentioned that earlier. The soil is important with success in plantings. I just wanted to jump back on that and stress that again. It becomes even more important because you're really running that engine hard. That soil as an ecological system, you're pushing it hard when you do succession planting. Just kind of keep that in mind. Yeah. It reminds me of something, Ray, that if you're new to this or haven't experienced this before, you might
00:35:32
Speaker
I don't maybe feel like a dumb question, but I don't think that it is. When we're talking about like, for instance, three subsequent plantings of lettuce that are spaced two weeks apart, each of those plantings is going in a slightly different place. It's not like you're seeding seeds right back on top of the ones that just came up and it's getting pulled out of that same area. And so what ends up happening if you get into the planting enough and you're thinking enough about it and you're considering soil health, as you just mentioned, Ray,
00:36:03
Speaker
I think you start to think about having field or row or bed maps over time that you're going to, after this is done in the summer, I'm going to plant a cover crop. Or after this is done in this particular time, I'm going to spread some mulch over this and let that kind of build, let the soil microbes catch up. Another thing that kind of came to mind too, when Alexis was talking earlier, is that that distinction, because some of the examples earlier was like,
00:36:32
Speaker
I'm planting this crop like a carrot. And then once I harvest it, like the harvest date is one day. Whereas if you're thinking about these multi-harvest things like tomatoes, like eggplants, like cut flowers, certain cut flowers.
00:36:47
Speaker
you're really thinking about the succession planting and planning for harvest windows of time. And so it could be that, you know, you're pretty sure you're going to get some tomatoes for an eight week period off of your first planting and you want to keep going. Well, you might plant it and try to make it happen so that in the sixth week of that first harvest, your next round of tomatoes come on and you're able to then taper off the first round. And the second one is this stuff is really,
00:37:15
Speaker
To me, there can be some complexity to the management of it, but the overall principle once you start explaining it is relatively simple. But yeah, I think, Ray, that's a really good point that we're not just trying to, again, throttle the soil as much as we can. We're just trying to take advantage of the fact that it's beautiful outside or
00:37:32
Speaker
at least amenable to growing plants outside for a long time, relatively long time. Managing those secondary things like diseases, you know, the soil being aside, you're managing things like diseases because as the intensity increases, usually disease pressure increases. As the intensity of spacing increases, you move things closer together relative
00:37:55
Speaker
you know, things like relative humidity increases, therefore diseases increase, all these things can increase. So there is it fair to say you guys that when we are working with the intensity in the form of succession planting, you're probably going to have to up your intensity of management of the soil of diseases and of the nutrients, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to up your game on all of these things. Yeah, I think crop rotation,
00:38:21
Speaker
So important when you talk about succession planting and in the way of like, how can you do this and not reinvent the wheel or not add more than you need to.
Role of Flowers in Crop Rotation
00:38:30
Speaker
Uh, and I'm taken back to, um, I was actually just looking at a publication. It was a publication I helped write. I was looking back at it. No, but looking at rotating, uh,
00:38:45
Speaker
tomatoes in a high tunnel with cut flowers and the reason why cut flowers was an option was because number one we could put something in there that was short enough day that you would get a crop out but when you were pulling those tomatoes out in August because they were you know just kind of exhausted
00:39:05
Speaker
So we've got something that'll fit that timeline before the first heart freeze. Another one was that we were rotating families. So tomato is solanaceous. There's very few solanaceous crops that are cut flowers. And so we were able to rotate the families, which helps with disease and insect pressure.
00:39:23
Speaker
You know, there's a market for the cut flowers in the fall, but also cut flowers are considered light feeders as in they don't really take a ton of nutrients. They don't need a lot of nutrients in comparison to something like tomatoes. So we know that there's often a lot of nutrients left over in the soil after a tomato crop, but we've got research on that. So by putting in the flowers, we can do little to no fertilizing of them because they can scavenge with the tomatoes left over. And then we're saving ourselves money.
00:39:51
Speaker
We're, you know, helping out the microbes by putting the roots back down in there. And we're not having to apply a bunch of fertilizers, um, which is essentially salts, right? Organic or not, uh, back to the soil. So, you know, I feel like we just keep making this more complicated, but like, I always tell people start with one crop, start with one thing that you either know you can sell or you know, your family will eat whatever level you're on there.
00:40:18
Speaker
and succession plant that and figure that one out and the rest will come a lot easier. And every year you can add another crop that you're succession planting and figuring out. So just focus on what the one you know you can sell consistently or the one you know your family will eat consistently. Or both, just in case people at the market don't buy it, family would be happy to eat it. Yeah, both. Or you could sell it to your children.
00:40:42
Speaker
I would sell it to my children. They're going to just ask you for money to buy it. It's an endless cycle. Well, then can't I just write that off? Isn't that a business write off? Where am I? That sounds like a business planning concept.
Succession Planting Preparation and Management
00:40:57
Speaker
Somebody called K-Carve. Somebody called a business planner. So I think a couple, just to summarize this here, a couple of the things to keep in mind. One is, do you want to even do the succession planning at all? And is there a compelling reason for you to want to do it?
00:41:11
Speaker
I think the compelling reasons are marketability, ongoing food needs, and fun. Those are three of the big reasons why someone would want to do that because they just enjoy getting out there. They feel like they want to have a product for their customer through the length of the season, or they want to be able to eat that themselves out of there. The things to take a look at as you're considering, go ahead and write down the crop that you want to do. And if you want to start with one and try that this year, that's great. If you want to do it with multiple,
00:41:40
Speaker
Write down what you have, the varieties that you're planning to do, the earliest you can plant it, the latest you can plant it, what are your expected days to maturity, and then take and convert that over and look at a calendar and say, okay, if my days to maturity are 30 days and the earliest I can plant is April 15th, and the latest I can plant is June 15th,
00:42:06
Speaker
I've got a window there where I can do, let's say, I'm going to do four different planting dates for that particular product. Try that this year. It's really as simple as that. How late can I plant it? How early can I plant it? And how many rounds do I want to try? Beyond that,
00:42:27
Speaker
complexity can increase a little bit and you could start doing this with multiple different crops same way that instead of a singular planting date it's like I'm gonna have 10 weeks of harvest off of this particular crop and I know that it has a 90 days to harvest and I need to start my transplants
00:42:44
Speaker
six or eight weeks before the planting date. And so you're just really sketching that out and planting that out now. And the good news is you have all that extra energy that gardeners have in this off-season that results in binge buying tons of cool seeds on the seed websites and it results in getting impatient and yelling at the sky maybe.
00:43:07
Speaker
to just spring, just get here. But use that energy now and maybe use a spreadsheet, maybe just use pen and paper, maybe use one of the sheets available from your extension or your other ag professionals around you. And just make a little sketched out plan and then do your best to follow it. The more that I think you can plan concretely now, the better once it gets a little scrambled and things are moving faster and the summer's blowing by later on that you'll be able to follow that.
00:43:35
Speaker
I think that's the main gist of what we've been talking about. Anybody else have any other take homes? All right, if not, Alexis, take us out. So thank you all for joining us today. And we hope that as we grow the podcast, you grow with us. Have a great one.