Maximize Your Vegetable Harvest with Succession Planting Learn the secrets to extending your vegetable harvest through succession planting from Minnesota gardener Meg Cowden. 4 ways to get the most out of your vegetable garden
One of Meg Cowden’s goals is to harvest something to eat from her Minnesota garden for as many weeks as possible each year. She thinks of it like many of us do our flower gardens, where the goal is multi-season interest. Meg focuses on growing the right amount of food for her family through succession planting strategies like repeatedly sowing crops, staggering maturity and rotating crops throughout the seasons. She also uses these techniques to keep peak harvests less overwhelming. The goal is to have enough for fresh eating, sharing with friends and donating, and to keep up with canning, freezing and drying.
Meg shares lots of helpful garden tips in her book “Plant, Grow, Harvest, Repeat.” Here are a few that’ll help you stretch out your harvests for months.
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A typical growing season in zone 4 Minnesota starts in May, but Meg likes to start planting in April. The secret to this early start lies in work that she does months earlier: When she’s cleaning up the garden and spreading compost on her beds in fall, she also chooses a couple of beds and sets up PVC hoop frames over them. In February she fastens the greenhouse poly material in the photo above over the frames. Even when temperatures are still below 20 degrees and there’s snow on the ground, she says that in two weeks, the soil
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