Succession planting in your in-ground outdoor garden is the process of planting seeds over and over at set time intervals, usually during the first few weeks and beyond of the usual planting period. Each plant will grow up and begin producing fruit in a specified length of time. The time it takes is usually on the back of a seed packet or in a catalog and is called 'time to maturity'. Each plant will mature at a different date on the calender. The first planting will produce first, the second planting next, and so on.

You can continue to do succession planting as long as the plant will have enough time to mature before the first frost, unless you intend to protect it from the frosts and allow it to mature in spite of the end of the traditional garden season. You can protect your later sowings with various methods. Some of the easiest ways are to cover the plants with blankets, pots, boxes, plastic domes, glass domes, straw, pine needles, cold frames, etc. You will need to uncover them in the morning after the frost so they will get some sunshine, unless it happens to be snowing and dark out, then you might want to wait until the storm is over.

In order to get the most out of your succession planting, you will need to know what gardening zone you are in and the last and first frost dates that bookend your gardening season. Your local weather station can provide this information. You can get frost predictions on the internet also. Just Google it. Once you have that information, you can start figuring out how late (or early) you can plant and still get a harvest. For instance:

If you look inside a seed catalog, you will see something like "Porterhouse Beefsteak Tomato" 80 days. That means it will take 80 days to get fruit off the plant from the time you have sown the seed. All this is based on normal sowing methods outdoors. Since 80 days is almost a whole summer long, and you want to be able to pick tomatoes way before the Fourth of July, you simply count back from the first of July at least 80 days, and that is the date you will need to sow the seeds. June has 30 days, then go back further and May has 30 days, which makes May 1st 60 days before, so you will need to go back 20 more days to April 9th to have your sowing date in order to have tomatoes by the Fourth of July.

And then, since producing fruit does not necessarily mean a nice big fat juicy red tomato ready to eat, you will want to make sure there is time for the fruit to fully ripen also, so calculate how long that will take, and add that to the total days needed to get your tomatoes ready to pick. Since it is going to be around July 4th, it will be hot, so probably 10 days will be enough to have them ready. Then, if you want to be very sure, put in a buffer zone in your plans - add another length of time you think might make it a sure thing, say 2 weeks. Now you have a seed sowing date that is somewhere in late March, so you simply set up your seed starting supplies and make it happen around that time. It is a good idea to put the date you sowed the seeds on the plant marker. In two weeks you will start another set of seeds, date them, and in another two weeks, repeat the process again, and again as long as you want.

The only thing you need to remember is that it will take at least 80 days to get anything from the planting. Also, if the weather is cooling down, the growth and ripening will slow down as well, and make the maturity date longer than specified.

Tomato plants moved into the greenhouse

Succession planting can be used for any type of vegetable and some flowers as well. The different kinds of veggies will have different maturity dates, and some may not slow down much as the weather cools, prefering cooler temperatures over the hot mid-summer days. See our related article about Winter Vegetables, for some ideas on what to plant during the cooler seasons.