The Benefits of Staggered Plantiing
Have you ever cut the last head of broccoli off the stem, and realized regretfully there would be no more fresh plants until next year? Although each season eventually must give way to the next, you can make the most of each planting stage by staggering your planting.
Staggering is a planting technique where you plant the desired amount of crops in stages. If you want your lettuce to last all season for example, you would plant a few one week, more the next, and more the next until almost the end of the season.
By spreading out the harvest, new crops are growing as your old ones mature, so you don’t run out until the end of the season. This is the main reason why people choose to stagger crops, but there’s also some other great reasons.
Reduces Risk of Complete Crop Failure
Even the best gardeners sometimes lose crops. Cabbage maggots can eat their way through a head of cabbage in a trice, or perhaps a disease sweeps through the tomatoes. These things happen, but if you just have one crop going, that could mean no cabbage or tomatoes at all.
Staggered crops are more resistant to failure. If your first rotation is affected by disease, your second rotation might not be. If one crop is devoured by pests, the other crops may miss that life stage.
This is a great reason to stagger plantings, especially if you are currently depending on your garden.
Reduces Overabundance
Even if you can, dehydrate, or otherwise preserve, a huge glut of crops all at once can be a heavy burden. No one wants to toil over a canner the entire day because 50 pounds of tomatoes are going to go bad all at once.
You might enjoy slipping on your ninja costume and looking for unlocked cars to shove zucchini into under the cover of darkness, but the recipients don’t look forward to it.
Spreading out the produce through the season makes it more available fresh and makes preserving it easier.
If you want to make the most of each season, staggered planting is a wonderful strategy to keep the harvest going.
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