All posts by Jordan Charbonneau

Crops for Succession Planting

May 11, 2022 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

There’s nothing like meals with homegrown ingredients straight from your garden. Grocery store produce can’t compare in flavor or price. If your goal is to eat as much fresh food from your garden as possible this season, you’ll need to use succession planting.

Succession planting means that you don’t plant all at once. For example, you can sow a patch of lettuce or salad greens every couple of weeks so that when some bolts, another batch will be ready to harvest. This method also works great with crops like sweet corn that mature all at once. Sow a block every two weeks to have sweet corn over a more extended period.

Here in the Southeast, you can get several successions of many crops. Just check your estimated first frost date. Then look at a crop’s days to maturity and count backward. Note, when daylight hours are dwindling during the fall, you need to add on some extra days.

Here are some of the crops that are ideal for succession planting:

Collards

Especially in the Southeast, collards can be grown for quite a long season. Here in zone 7a, we begin sowing collards on March 10th and continue until September 1st.

Sweet Corn

As I mentioned above, sweet corn planted simultaneously will all be ready to harvest at the same time. This method of planting is excellent if you want to freeze or can a bunch, but not ideal for fresh eating. In zone 7a, we plant can plant successions of corn from about April 21st through July 15th.

Zinnias

Flowers can be succession planted too! Zinnias are one of the easiest cut flowers to grow, and sowing several successions can keep you in beautiful bouquets all summer long.

Beans

Succession planting may not be necessary for dry beans, but planting a few successions can be a good idea if you’re growing beans for fresh eating. Planting beans at different times can also help figure out a good planting time to avoid bean beetles. In zone 7a, we begin planting beans around April 15th. We sow pole beans until July 15th and bush beans until August 1st.

Summer Squash & Zucchini

If you’ve been gardening for a few years, you’re probably familiar with the gluttony of squash just a few plants can provide. To help mitigate this, plant just a couple of hills at a time and spread that harvest out! In zone 7a, we plant summer squash and zucchini from April 21st through July 21st.

Cucumbers

Like summer squash, cucumbers can provide an overwhelming abundance if you plant a large patch. If you’re canning pickles, this is a great thing! However, if you want to enjoy the crunch of fresh cucumbers over a longer season, you’ll need to plant multiple successions. Succession planting can also help you get a larger crop even if you struggle with losing plants to Downey mildew and other diseases. Here in zone 7a, we’ll sow cucumbers from around May 1st to July 21st.

Beets

Beets thrive in cool weather, but you can still get several successions in. We recommend doing a few in the spring and a few in the fall. Fall beets are ideal for storage. In zone 7a, we sow beets during the spring from March 15th to June 15th and then again in late summer from August 15th through September 15th.

Broccoli

Many gardeners think of broccoli just as an early spring crop, but with a little work, you can get multiple broccoli harvests throughout the season. Here in zone 7a, we can do a combination of direct sowing and transplanting. We begin sowing indoors on January 31st and continue until May 31st. We start transplanting out on March 15th and continue to July 15th. We also direct sow from March 10th through July 1st. Check out our post, Tips for Direct Sowing in Hot Weather for advice on sowing cool-season crops like broccoli during the summer.

Turnips

Like beets, we sow turnips in the spring and again for our fall garden. In the spring, we sow them from March 10th through April 15th. In the fall garden, we sow them from August 7th through October 1st.

These are just a few of the crops well-suited to succession planting. You may also want to try carrots, radishes, spinach, Swiss chard, and other vegetables. We even do tomatoes to ensure we have enough late tomatoes for our fall taste testings! Use succession planting in your garden to have smaller quantities of fresh produce over a longer season.

Garden Advice

Beginner’s Guide to Okra & Giveaway

May 3, 2022 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Okra has long been a common crop in southern gardens. This warm-weather-loving plant originated in northeast Africa and was brought to the U.S. in the late 1660s by way of the slave trade or via Europe. Its high mucilage content makes it an excellent vegetable for thickening soups and stew, but it’s got many other uses too! Grow your own with this beginner’s guide to growing okra.

Preparing a Bed

Okra needs a location with full sun to maximize production. It thrives in fertile, loamy, well-drained soil. The ideal soil pH is between 6.5 and 7.0. Okra does best with lots of hummus, so it’s good to add a couple of inches of well-aged compost to the bed before planting.

Planting Okra

Okra seeds have a hard seed coat and germinate slowly, especially in older varieties. To speed things up, soak your seed overnight before planting. Alternatively, you can use a technique called scarification. It sounds complicated, but it just means you use sandpaper to lightly abrade the seed coat before planting, helping it break down faster.

Okra can be started indoors or direct sown. To start indoors, sow in pots 2 to 3 weeks before planting out. To direct sow okra, wait until all danger of frost has passed and the soil temperature averages 65°F. Sow seeds 3/4 to 1 inches deep.

If you live in a northern climate, sow okra indoors 2 to 3 weeks before your last frost date. Some folks with high tunnels or other season extension methods may be able to set them out a bit earlier; just make sure they have plenty of room to grow. Okra can get up to 6 feet tall!

If you’ve started your seeds indoors, be sure to harden off your okra like other seedlings before transplanting. It’s best to transplant on an overcast day or in the evening. Water your plants in well.

Sow or transplant your okra into rows 5 to 6 feet apart. Transplant or thin your okra to 18 inches apart in the rows.

Caring for Okra

Once plants are a few inches tall, mulch heavily around them, this keeps the soil cool and moist and helps suppress weeds.

Keep okra plants well watered through the summer. They are most productive and disease-resistant when grown in moist soil.

Some folks side-dress okra with compost of balanced fertilizer once they’re about 6 inches tall. However, you want to avoid over-fertilizing. Too much nitrogen encourages okra to put more energy into leaf production and little into flower and pod production.

Grow okra on a 4-year garden rotation plan to avoid pest and disease issues. It’s worth noting that older okra varieties are more resistant to root-knot nematodes due to their deep root systems. Grasshoppers may eat your okras’ lower leaves.

Harvesting

Most okra varieties are best when harvested between 2 and 4 inches long. Pod tenderness will vary over the season. You may be able to snap young pods off with your hands, or you can use hand pruners to cut them.

You may want to wear gloves and long sleeves when harvesting okra. Okra has hairy leaves and tiny spines on the pods, which irritate most people’s skin.

The Whole Okra & Giveaway

If you want to learn more about this amazing crop, check out The Whole Okra: A Stem to Stem Celebration by our friend Chris Smith. He provides excellent growing advice, history, recipes from chefs, and a fantastic look at the many uses for okra, including okra oil, okra coffee, okra marshmallows, okra tofu, okra vodka, okra pickles, okra pancakes.

Be sure to visit us on Instagram this week! We’re giving away a copy of The Whole Okra and a packet of one of Smith’s favorites, Puerto Rico Everblush Okra. Visit us on Instagram @southernexposureseed before Thursday, May 5th, 2022, at midnight EST to enter for your chance to win.

Garden Advice, Seed Saving

7 Steps to Saving Cabbage Seed

April 28, 2022 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Most seed savers get started with a few large-seeded, easy-to-grow and harvest crops, like beans, corn, tomatoes, peppers, and squash. If you’re ready to take the next step in your seed-saving journey or have an adventurous spirit, you may be ready to tackle cabbage. Saving cabbage seed can be tricky for a couple of reasons, but it is doable. Keep reading to learn the steps to save seed from your favorite cabbage varieties.

Choose a Variety

To get viable seed, you want to grow an open-pollinated cabbage variety. All the cabbages we carry at SESE are open-pollinated. To learn more about what open-pollinated means, check out our post, What’s in a Seed: Open-Pollinated Vs. Hybrid Vs. GM.

Consider Isolation Distance

One of the tricky parts about saving seed from cabbages and other brassicas is that there are so many brassicas. This makes it difficult to save seed from more than one variety each year. For example, you may want to save seed from cabbage, but you can’t just isolate it from other cabbages. Cabbage will cross with kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale!

To prevent this problem, all you need to do is only let one of your brassicas go to flower each year. Harvest the others before they bolt. Unlike many brassicas, cabbages are biennial, meaning they flower and set seed the second year. This can be helpful when preventing them from crossing with other seed crops.

If you’re determined to save seed from multiple brassicas or cabbage varieties, you’ll need to isolate them. For home use, isolate your cabbages by 1/8 of a mile. For pure seed, small plantings need to be isolated by 14 to 1/2 a mile!

Select Your Best Plants

When you save seed, you want to think about maintaining the quality of a variety or maybe even improving it each year. To do this, you should save seed from your best plants. You can consider disease resistance, drought tolerance, earliness, flavor, and more when selecting plants. Check out our blog post, Selecting Plant Characteristics, to learn more.

You also want to ensure you save seed from enough plants to preserve viable genetics. For home use, five plants may be enough. However, to maintain a variety over a long period, you want to save seed from 20 to 50 plants each year.

Overwinter Your Cabbages

Cabbage is a biennial, meaning that it flowers and sets seed during its second year of life. To get your cabbage to set seed, you’ll need it to overwinter. In areas with 10 to 12 weeks of cool weather below 50°F that doesn’t regularly dip below 35°F, you can overwinter cabbages in the field.

If you live in a colder climate, you’ll need to overwinter your cabbages in a sheltered location. Dig them up and pot them in large containers filled with damp potting mix or sand. Leave the heads intact but trim off any loose or dying leaves. Keep the roots as intact as possible.

Move the containers into a root cellar or unheated basement, garage, or shed. Ideally, you want to keep them between 34 and 40°F. In the spring, plant them back out in the field. You may need to stake them.

Ensure Seeds are Fully Mature

You need to catch cabbage seeds at the right time. They won’t continue to mature once removed from the plant, so it’s crucial to ensure that the seed pods and the seeds inside become dry and brown. Don’t wait too long, though! Dry pods may begin to shatter and drop seeds, or birds may take them.

Harvest Your Seeds

It’s easiest to harvest seeds by cutting off entire branches. Then place them on an old sheet. You can use your hands to break the pods or thresh them by hitting them with a thick stick or rod. Mature seed should separate from the pods readily.

Store Your Seeds

Once seeds are fully dry they can be stored somewhere cool and dark in airtight containers. Cabbage seed should remain viable for several years. Learn how to do a simple germination test here.

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