Why succession planting at home is the best farming option?
The Succession Planting Method (SPM) could be summarized as: Plant weekly what you consume weekly.
If you do that, you create plant sequences from the most recently sown planter to the oldest harvesting one.
It is not lot production, in which planting is done by lots, and all the plants grow evenly until harvest.
In both methods, required space and yields are the same for equal production targets; however, with SPM, you limit garden maintenance time to the weekly replacement of the harvest-drained plants.
Lot production requires preparation and planting time for the lot, whereas SPM requires time only for the preparation and planting of the weekly replaced plants.
Hence, succession planting is ideal for synchronizing home farming production with the household’s weekly food needs.
Let us show an example to illustrate the benefit of synchronizing.
Suppose you are willing to eat twenty-eight potatoes per week for fourteen weeks which is the potato plant life span.
If your weekly goal is 28 potatoes, you will need 392 potatoes to feed yourself during the fifteen weeks.
If a potato plant yields 4 units, it will require 49 containers with two plants each to get the 392 potatoes.
You will have to wait fourteen weeks to get your first potato with any of the two methods, but let’s see how you employ your time in each of those.:
- If you adopt SPM, you will plant four containers every week that will yield your weekly potato ration (28 units) within fourteen weeks. At the end of the cycle, you will end up having 49 planted containers that will be sequentially producing your weekly potato ration.
- Suppose that it takes 5 minutes to prepare and plant one container. With this method, getting the 4 containers ready will take around 20 minutes every week.
- Imagine now that you will go for the traditional Lot Planting method. Preparing and planting the required 49 containers will take 4 hours 5 minutes at a rate of five minutes per container.
- Of course, you will obtain the 392 potatoes at the end of the fourteen week period, but you will have to immediately prepare and plant the following 49-container crop that you will harvest in the next fourteen week cycle. This new task will probably take more than five hours because you will have to enrich the new soil and find space in your kitchen to safely store the bounty that will feed you for the next fourteen weeks.
Synchronizing your food needs with succession planting at home has additional advantages besides more efficient time use:
- If you want to change your crop, you can start planting it the following week without waiting until the current crop life cycle ends to start growing it.
- Pests can only damage the oldest plants of the cycle, giving more time to combat them.
- And last but not least, you will save on storage costs like freezing and rot prevention.
Succession planting can also be done in different periods than the week. For a typical short-term vegetable like legumes, the week is ideal. Still, crops with longer lifetimes may require longer succession planting intervals to be practical. Johnny’s Selected Seeds shows a chart you will find handy with suggested intervals according to the crop.
Finally, it is good to clarify that the succession planting approach requires the same space as lot planting for a similar production target. To save space, you will have to consider vertical planting in its different versions. At AuroraPlanner, we have our own approach. Please take a look at our 2HPS planter stand.
After all the explanations, you may wonder why Succession Planting at home is not more popular.
This is the conclusion I arrived at when researching about best greenhouse practices some time ago:
Succession Planting is a continuous method, not a discrete lot by lot one.
If your goal is commercial, you will always want to match your harvest time with the top-price season. That is why you want the whole lot to be ready close to the high-price target date.
Growing your own food is a different matter; it is an ongoing process.
Your goal is efficiency, especially with your time.
Your city job, your main source of income, consumes most of your time.
And your aim is to get healthy food at a meager cost, not to become a commercial farmer!
Please look at an example of our succession planting chart to have an idea of how much space is needed to start being self-sufficient:
And, if you want to create your own 2HPS backyard layout based on your own food requirements.
Fill in the food quantities you consume per week in the following table and, according to your experience, the amounts your plants yield.
With that input, the table will show the number of containers (grow bags) you need to ensure production, and the number of containers you will need to replace each week to keep production going continuously.