An Experiment in Succession Planting
Mixed Greens Bed
The 2025 planting season in the Posh Market Garden has been a series of experiments, starting with direct sowing most of the vegetables, trying to train tomato plants to grow over an arched trellis and succession planting my lettuce. This blog post is going to focus on the later as it has proved the most successful of the three experiments.
The concept of succession planting is straight forward, you plant a series of veggies one after the other to ensure you have produce growing and available for harvest all summer long. Last summer I sort of did this with my mixed greens, but it was more driven by the fact that some of the lettuce didn’t take seed. This year I decided to be intentional and approach the succession planting in a more methodical way. I first divided the bed into short section, each one designated for a different variety of leafy greens. As mentioned in an earlier post, I scaled back the number or rows within a bed to two, this gives me a larger boarder to accommodate mowing and weeding between beds. I planted the first section of lettuce in late May, the next one about three weeks later, the one after that also another three to four weeks and the final succession planting, I finished this week. So, the planting of lettuce has been spread out over a month and a half. Spacing it like I did made it less stressful and gave me time in between to prep each section of the bed, order more netting and add more drip heads.
Like last year some of the seeds didn’t take but unlike last year I didn’t sweat it. I’m more comfortable with the growing process of veggies and now realize that not all your seeds will take, and it is just part of the gardening process to occasionally have some bare spots. Because I’ve devoted an entire bed to lettuce, I know that even with a few holes I will have plenty of mixed greens both to eat and to sell. There is also more than enough to share with our Airbnb guests. After all, the market garden and all the goodness it gives in the form of fresh fruits and veggies is one of the key amenities of the Cottage!
I’ve enjoyed this garden experiment and have decided to try it out on another bed that I originally planted with flowers, but none have sprouted. It is a little different kind of succession planting, more like what I did last year but I still want to see if the experiment works. For the replanting of this bed, I am experimenting to see how late in the season I can plant and see how these veggies and flowers do as summer moves into fall… I did a companion planting of Kale seeds next to a row of Calendula flower seeds. I also planted Bush beans in the hoop house with the tomatoes to see how they would far this late in the summer and in the green house.
Since Andy’s stroke turned the planting and growing of the Market Garden on its head, I figure why not embrace the challenges and just conduct as many gardening experiments that I can and see what I can learn! It is a much healthier approach to gardening and takes away all the pressure I was feeling in May. Gardening for me was supposed to be fun, part of my endeavor to live a joyful life and until I made this mental shift in my approach it was anything but fun! Now as I start to harvest these beautiful leafy greens, the joy is coming back, and my garden is again one of my happy places.
