Have you ever had that one magical week in the garden where it's giving you exactly what you want and what you need?

Like just enough lettuce, a handful of carrots, some green beans, a couple of tomatoes, just what you need for the week, right?

And then like two or three weeks later, you're absolutely drowning in zucchini and nothing else is doing anything?

Yeah, today we're going to fix that because the goal for most home gardeners isn't the biggest possible harvest on one weekend, right?

The goal is steady, usable harvests week after week so that we're actually eating from the garden regularly without like a sudden produce avalanche.

I'm going to teach you a planning method that revolves around harvest windows.

So instead of only asking when do I plant this, we're going to ask when do I want to be harvesting this and do I want it over and over again?

I'm going to walk you through a simple framework and give you a few practical rules of thumb for how often certain crops can be replanted or staggered to keep the harvest going.

Welcome back to just grow something.

I'm Karen Velez, I grow specialty crops for a living.

I've got a horticulture background and I help home gardeners build skills that last so you're not restarting from scratch every season.

This podcast is your evidence based guide for the garden basics and the what do I do now?

Moments from planting, planting, harvesting and storing to pests, weeds and disease, all explained in a way that you can actually use.

Let's dig in.

January is per prime planning season, and one of the best planning upgrades that you can make, especially if you want to eat from the garden steadily, is to plan your harvest timing on purpose.

So we talk about this idea in a bunch of different ways.

Stretching the season or continuous harvest, staggered planting, relay planting, succession sowing, right?

Whatever you call it, the core concept is the same.

A well planned garden isn't just a list of what you want to grow, it is a schedule.

And preferably it is a schedule of harvests.

So we're going to build a plan that supports that continuous harvest using harvest windows as the organizing system.

A harvest window is basically just the span of time that you can reasonably expect to harvest a crop, Whether that is a really short window like radishes that come in all at once, or a longer window, something like tomatoes that usually keep on producing for weeks and weeks, sometimes months, or something that is a repeated window.

So maybe lettuces where you can keep sewing small batches for fresh harvests over a longer period of time.

Planning by harvest windows works because it forces two really important questions.

How long will I be harvesting this crop once it starts?

And if I want it again later, what is my plan to keep it coming?

This matters because a seed packets days to maturity is only a part of the story for continuous harvest planning.

We also care about the length of that harvest, plus how weather or seasonal changes speeds up or slows down that growth.

Right.

That is the big theme in continuous harvest scheduling.

So if you've ever planted the garden and then wondered why your harvest feels overwhelming and unpredictable, harvest windows are how you smooth that out.

A lot of gardeners plan like this.

What do I want to grow?

And then we figure out when do I plant it?

OK, harvest window planning looks more like what do I want to be eating and when?

Which then we figure out what needs to happen for that to be true.

And that tiny little change is what turns our garden plan into something we can actually live with all season.

And that works for our real life.

I find planning in a way that stretches the harvest out across the season to be really, really effective.

And so the garden produces over time instead of all at once.

Now, how you do this have this plan, whether it's on paper or on a spreadsheet or on an app, that is entirely up to you and how you like to do things.

I feel like the garden is very tactile before I am doing it by hand on pieces of paper, but whatever works for you.

Either way, I'm going to give you a step by step process that starts with the harvest you want and then it works backwards.

So step number one is to choose your core harvest crops.

So last week we talked about picking your top ten list of crops for the garden and then maybe plus you're like experimental or peripheral ones right now.

Let's use that list to pick a shorter list of the crops that you want to harvest continuously.

Not everything needs to be a continuous harvest crop.

Some things are fine to come on in a rush, especially if you like preserving.

Some things you may not want all season.

This is broccoli for me.

I might want a little bit of broccoli in the spring and then maybe a little bit of broccoli in the fall, but it is certainly not something that I want to be harvesting or eating all season long.

But for most home gardeners, there are usually a few core crops that you do want again and again.

So this could be things like leafy greens or some specific herbs.

Maybe green beans are your thing, or cucumbers.

Maybe you really like, you know, carrots and beets and you can eat those all the time.

Or for a lot of us, it's zucchini or maybe sweet corn if you grow it and you have the space for that.

So out of that top ten list that you made of things that you want to grow, pick three to six crops from that list that you want to be harvesting steadily.

OK.

And then if you did the exercise last week where you marked their primary use, then look at that.

And if not, OK, go ahead and mark them.

Now.

What is for fresh use, Meaning you want it for like weekly meals and what is for preserving?

So maybe you want a bigger window for a bulk harvest, right?

Or maybe you want a little bit of both.

You can write both on there too.

That one word descriptor is basically going to influence how often you replant and how much of this particular crop that you grow.

And then the secret sauce to this is to also label each crop by its harvest style, because not all crops behave the same, right?

So for harvest windows, we can sort of sort these crops into one of three categories.

Category A would be those one and done harvests, right?

These are crops that mostly harvest in a short burst.

They basically come ready all at once.

So radishes or head lettuces or root crops, if you harvest them all at once, like those carrots or those beets, right?

Some broccoli types even, depending on how you harvest, the harvest window for these can be really short.

So if you want them more than once, these are the ones that we plan.

Succession plantings or relay plantings of.

These are often what I call rapid succession crops or split successions.

Either they mature very quickly and all at once or they can be planted multiple times but usually only like on the cooler shoulder seasons.

So their succession is split across the season category B would be those cut and come again harvest.

So these are your more study producers if you harvest them correctly.

So like loose leaf lettuces or spinach, maybe kale or collards Chard, a lot of the herbs, these are the ones where you can stretch the harvest window by harvesting the outer leaves and that encourages the regrowth.

And then you can also keep them going by doing staggered plantings.

So these could be rapid successions or even mid range success, meaning they take a little bit longer to mature and the harvest window depends basically on how you are harvesting them.

And then category C would be those long season producers.

These are the ones that give you a longer harvest once they start.

So think things like tomatoes and Peppers, Cucumbers.

For a lot of us, that's summer squashes.

If you're doing indeterminate pole beans.

For these, a continuous harvest is often less about replanting the same crop repeatedly and more about making sure that we're planting them at the right time or we're choosing the right varieties.

And sometimes it means using more than one variety with a different maturity timing.

These are long season successions.

These likely aren't going to be planted more than once unless you have special circumstances, but they might be good candidates to be relay planting after something else has left the garden.

So go back through your list and for each one of those, you know, three to six crops that you plant or you decided were going to be your sort of continuous harvest plants, put them in a category AB or C.

This is where we kind of, you know, help our planning get a little bit easier because now we're planning based on the plants behavior.

Now here is where we get sort of visual with our planning.

You're going to make a simple grid on paper, or you can use a spreadsheet across the top of this grid.

You want to write the months that you will be gardening, and this includes sort of the months where you're also planting, not necessarily where you're just harvesting or if you want a lot of detail, you can do this in weeks, which likely means that you're going to have to have multiple sheets.

So let's just start with the months, OK?

Do your months across the top.

And then down the side, you're going to write those 3 to 6 core crops that you want continuous or multiple harvests from that are sort of in that category A&B.

And then you also want to list those long season producers, those category C crops like your tomatoes or your Peppers, right?

And then you can also pop in there what we would consider to be filler crops.

These are crops that you can tuck in anywhere, like radishes or leafy greens.

These usually also fall into that category A, but you may not necessarily be reliant on these, right?

So these are things where you're just going to kind of fill in where you have room on the plan.

Also on this sheet, we want to add those season anchors, so your last frost date and your first frost date.

If frost isn't your limiter, then you're using whatever your main seasonal constraint is.

So when's your rainy season or your daylight hours?

Whatever it is, this frost date anchoring is important for our continuous harvest schedule because planting dates and how quickly crops mature changes with the seasons.

So that's why we want to work with harvest windows and not strict dates.

Gardening is going to be kind of fluid based on a lot of different factors.

And then you can also on this grid just label across the top to what your cool seasons are and what your warm seasons are.

So for me, this would look like, you know, cool season in the beginning months and then, you know, a sort of warm season there in the middle and then a very short cool season again at the end.

Even if your climate is different from mine, you still have seasonal shifts.

Crops thrive in different conditions, and that affects the window where you can plant and the window where you will harvest.

This is also important too, because sometimes in the instructions that you see on seed packets or in seed catalogs, it may give you actual specific information like OK, plant in May for a July harvest.

But again, if you live someplace way South in southern Texas or southern Florida or something that May to July window might already be way too warm.

You might actually have to be planting in March, you know, for a May or June harvest.

So this is going to help you sort of avoid any confusion that might come with those types of instructions and have you planting or, or designing your plantings based on your actual season.

So now we can use three different strategies to achieve this continuous harvest.

The first strategy is to plant the same crop more than once.

This is classic succession planting, planting smaller amounts at regular intervals so that they mature at different times.

So when one harvest window is finished, then the next one is just coming ready and you have a steady supply.

Sometimes we do this in what I call split successions, so multiple plantings in spring and then a break in the summer and then one or two plantings in the fall.

And this accommodates those crops that just don't like the heat.

So usually this is things like in my area, leafy greens, brassicas, you know, some of the the herbs that aren't real don't really like the heat as much.

And so this gives them that break from the summer heat, but it still gives me multiple crops.

So yours might vary, of course, depending on where it is that you're gardening.

The second strategy is to plant different varieties within that same crop that have different days to maturity.

So instead of planting just one lettuce variety and planting it like every three weeks for the first section of the gardening season, you would plant an early and a mid and a late maturing type.

Or, you know, at least varieties with different maturity windows so that the the harvest naturally staggers.

This works for a lot of crops and actually saves on labor too.

You know, corn is a classic example of this, planting all the corn at one time, but making sure that they are varieties that mature at 65 days, 80 days and then 95 days so that you get around 2 weeks between harvests and they don't cross pollinate.

This works with any crop that you want multiple harvest from that have varieties with different days to maturity.

The caveat to this is if you're doing this in the spring, you have to remember that as the soil warms up and the day length increases, crops are going to tend to mature a little bit more quickly.

So while you might plant varieties that technically mature, you know, two weeks apart from each other.

So let's use the corn for an example, 6580 and 95 days.

Those are all 15 days apart.

But what you might find is that between the 65 and 80 day crop, you know, window your harvest them at like 14 days apart.

But then between the 80 and 95 days, you might only be harvesting them 10 days apart.

So just kind of keep that in mind when you're planning this difference, this type of a strategy.

And then the third strategy is relay planting.

So this is replacing those finished crops with new crops.

This is sort of a fill and follow method.

And so basically when something finishes in the garden, then you already know what's going into that space next.

And this is probably where most gardeners start with their their sort of continuous harvest plan.

This is sort of natural, what we might decide to do the first time we start planting, OK, Or we start planning, really.

So now we're going to apply these different strategies to the grid that you wrote out.

So the first thing to do is to decide your ideal harvest window, OK?

Remember, we are planning the garden around when we want to harvest, when we want to be eating these things and how frequently, OK?

So instead of starting with planting dates, we start with our ideal harvest dates.

Now we're going to assume that these dates are realistic.

I mean, in my area, lettuce in like the Midsummer is not going to be possible, but in some areas it will be, right?

So in an ideal world, when would you like to be harvesting lettuce?

When would you like to be harvesting beans?

When do you want your main season harvest to come in right?

Do you do you want a fall garden harvest window?

This is one of the most compelling reasons to have a really solid garden plan, so you can stretch the harvest so you have a continuous supply across the season.

So for each of those crops on your list, write the months that you would love to be harvesting it.

OK, so for example, lettuce, you could say you want lettuce from May through October.

Is it going to be possible?

Maybe we'll talk about that in a minute.

OK, Just write your pie in the sky dreams down.

Lettuce from May through October.

You want Bush beans from June through September.

Carrots.

You want them.

You know, maybe you want carrots all season long, but maybe you only want beets like in June and July and then again in like October and November.

Or you want your cucumbers all season.

Yours is going to vary by region.

That's fine.

This is the wish list harvest window.

OK.

And then we convert that wish list into a plan.

And for continuous harvest scheduling, you typically need 3 pieces of information, your appropriate planting windows, the days to maturity on the crops that you're planning on planting and then the length of harvest from first to last picking.

And we are going to work backwards using these days to maturity and this harvest length.

OK, So days to maturity are on the seed packets in the catalogs.

The harvest length, you learn this partly from experience.

So you may have to estimate this from at the beginning.

You can also kind of look this up and say like how how long can you typically harvest Bush green beans?

You know, if you ask a question like that, you're going to get an answer that's going to average you around 2 to 3 weeks, you know, or an estimated window of picking.

OK, so start there.

The simple version is the start of the harvest window, right?

Which is basically you take your transplanting date or the date of emergence, you add the days to maturity.

And remember the days to maturity starts at transplanting or emergence, not when we planted the seed, right?

So we're going to presume that that is the start of our harvest window, whatever date we transplanted and plus the days to maturity on the seed packet, that is the start of our harvest window.

The end of the harvest window depends on the crop type, right?

Is it a one and done crop?

Well then we have a very short window, usually about a week or two.

If it's a cut and come again type of a crop, then it's got a longer window if the conditions are right and we are harvesting properly.

If it's a long season producer, well, then we definitely have a longer window once those plants are established and have started producing.

And then if we're doing relay crops, well, the next crop starts a new window.

So you almost get to decide when the end of that harvest window is if you want to cut it shorter, right?

We do have to remember in this that later plantings often grow faster because those conditions improve, right?

So the difference between planting dates doesn't always equal the difference between the harvest dates.

There is a catch up effect here and it's most obvious in the spring and then the reverse actually happens in the fall.

The later crops slow down in maturity as the day's March on.

So you might want to stagger your plantings further apart in the spring and then maybe closer together in the fall.

Again, this takes some experience so I accident absolutely recommend taking notes in.

What's that?

Oh yeah, your garden journal.

OK, so let's talk practical rhythms for your planting intervals.

One resource that I really like is from the University of Minnesota Extension, and it includes a table of example planting intervals for like a continuous harvest for a variety of different crops.

So things like leaf lettuces you would plant weekly, Beans you would plant about every 10 days.

Carrots and beets you plant every couple of weeks and so on.

So I'll leave a link to that in the show notes.

But if you check it out, ignore the entry for peas, it says like 110 days.

I think they meant 10 days and somebody typoed it, I'm assuming.

I mean, if you waited 110 days and I guess you would be trying for a spring crop and a fall crop.

So I don't know, maybe that was intentional.

But anyway, use your best judgment on that.

So what I am going to say about that chart and any other chart that you might find that gives you an idea for these planting intervals, These numbers are starting points, OK.

Your local climate, your planting window, your preferences are all going to affect the rhythm at which you do your planting intervals.

But these intervals are useful because they give you a repeatable planning pattern.

So choose an interval for each one of your core crops.

Look at the ones that you want to harvest continuously and decide, am I going to plant this every week?

Is it going to be every 10 to 14 days?

Will I just plant them every three weeks or no interval at all?

Maybe you just decide, you know what?

I don't want to mess with planting that one multiple times and it stays off the list.

OK, now you place those intervals onto your grid.

You're going to put your harvest windows onto the grid.

So for each crop, pick the harvest week that you want, count backwards by the number of days to maturity to find either the transplanting week or the date that the seed should be emerging.

And then you count backward based on the either the average days of germination, right, which is going to be your seed starting date or the number of days that it's supposed to be grown on indoors.

And that gets you your first planting date, right?

So you can actually get a lot of different information on this calendar.

You can have the dates that you're going to harvest, the date that you're going to plant and the date that you're going to start the seeds or, you know, buy the transplant or whatever.

And then when you look at that interval, then you can add repeat plantings based on the interval that you decided on.

And then you just stop when you reach the end of the planting window for your region.

So let's use lettuce as an example for this because it's a, it's a really easy one.

You know, lettuce for me would have its final harvest in June from a spring planting date and then we would pick up our harvest again in early October, right?

So I'm going to take that harvest window and I'm going to work backwards from there to tell me when that plant, that plant can be planted successfully and then the succession plantings that happened within that window for that crop based on my climate.

So once you do this, your harvest window grid starts to look like an overlapping like set of bars you've got.

You know this one, you start your harvest here, and then this one starts the harvest like a week or two later, and then this one starts after that.

You're literally building a continuous bar of harvest coverage for however long you want it to be.

So pick one of your core crops.

Leaf lettuce is a really good one to start with and just succession or sketch.

Sketch out your succession plan across the season and even if you only do 1 crop at first, you will get the hang of the method pretty quickly.

I know it kind of sounds complicated with me, like talking it and speaking it out loud.

Go back and listen again, right?

Go through and pause this episode as you do the work.

Once you get the hang of it, you can do this for all of your crops and it becomes easy to understand, right?

It sounds complicated, it is not, but it is very, very effective.

So to make this maybe a little bit easier to work with in terms of how you plan out a continuous harvest, I want to give you like 3 different templates that you can use just to simplify the thinking a little bit, right?

The first one would be having anchors and bridges and fillers.

So your anchors would be those long season producers that define your summer garden.

It could be tomatoes, your Peppers, cucumbers, squashes, that sort of thing.

The next would be the bridges.

These are the crops that kind of connect the seasons and fill in the gaps.

So your greens, your carrots, your beets, your herbs, right?

These are what I usually refer to as those split successions.

These are the ones that may only grow in the cooler shoulder seasons or they need to be broken up in some way to sort of bridge that gap, right?

And then the third thing is those fillers, those are those really quick crops that you can tuck in or that can follow behind something.

So radishes, really quick growing greens like arugula, those quick successions, the ones that mature very quickly and can just fill in space somewhere or act as a relay crop.

You can combine all three of these, your anchors, your bridges and your fillers.

And this creates the continuous harvest feel in your garden.

So if you define each crop as one of these these these three things, it makes it easier to know where they will fit into your plan.

The second template would be the same crop with different varieties.

This is that succession planning where if you want a longer harvest without having to do like a complex repeat sewing calendar, then you're just doing this by variety timing.

So you're filling the harvest window that relies on planting different varieties with different days to maturity all at the same time so that it naturally staggers the harvest.

So you'll do an early variety, a mid season variety and a later variety and you just plant them all at the same time and boom, you are done.

Now you just got to wait until the harvest.

OK.

And then the third template would be sort of breaking it up in your beds or in the garden as a whole into like 3 different seasons.

Your spring crop, your summer crop, your fall crop.

This is that relay planting concept.

The idea is that the same space can produce multiple crops over the season if you plan in sequence.

And this is probably where, like I said, everyone sort of naturally starts their garden planning journey.

At least this is where it started for me.

What does the bed look like across the season?

So it might be early greens and then transition to beans and then fall greens, right?

The exact crop is going to vary by region, but the planning principle is what matters.

So to complete your plan and fill all of your harvest windows, you might actually decide to use a combination of these techniques.

And one bed might be, you know, using those anchors and bridges and fillers.

And the next bed might be the same crop with different varieties.

And that third bed might be a spring crop into a summer crop and then to a fall crop again, it's your garden.

You figure out how to do it.

Just a matter of figuring out the plan.

Some crops are naturally continuous crops.

Some crops are better planned as a couple of batches, or one bulk harvest or one long season planting that you support.

Well, not every crop needs to be continuous.

So you know the method.

Choose the method based on the crop and the planting window and how long it takes to reach maturity and how long that harvest window is.

And then we also need to remember to add in those buffers because weather and biology are not robots and weather changes our garden timelines.

So 2 plantings 2 weeks apart and won't always harvest two weeks apart, especially in the spring and the fall.

So if it's a direct seeded crop, expect some variability for sure.

If it's a fall crop, count on slower growth as the day shorten.

If it's a heat sensitive crop, then expect that harvest window to shrink the closer you get to those higher heat months.

So when you sketch the harvest windows, building a little bit of slack.

And then of course, the part that turns you from guessing every year into being dialed in is using records to make every year easier and easier, right?

Continuous harvest scheduling improves massively when you keep basic records.

Hello, garden journal.

OK, we need to know what you planted, when you planted it, when the harvest started, how long it lasted.

OK, that's it.

That you know, even if you, if you, if you hate taking notes, just the bare minimum of the date it was planted and the first harvest and the last harvest.

That's going to tell you a lot of what you need to know for the next season because that's your personal harvest window data.

And it gets better every season, which in turn will help you plan better and get better at filling your ideal harvest windows.

So here is what you're going to do.

You're going to draw your grid with your months or your weeks if you want to get really detailed.

But again, I recommend just starting with the months the first time, right?

Pick one crop.

Pick the greens that you want to grow, or the beans or the carrots, whatever it is, pick one crop to do this with.

Decide the harvest span that you want.

Choose that interval rhythm.

So are you going to plant weekly or every 10 days or every three weeks?

Whatever it is, add those plantings onto your grid across the viable planting window.

So if you can only grow lettuces on the cool shoulder seasons, don't put plantings in the middle of the summer.

We know that's not going to work, right?

So plant it, do it across the viable planting window and then circle those kind of gap weeks that might be caused by like an ideal weather conditions for that crop and then choose a filler crop for each one of those gaps.

And now you have one lane of continuous harvest with one or maybe 2 crops in it.

OK, now do that for three different crops, 3 different lanes.

And I think you will begin to visualize the difference in your plan immediately because you will be able to see exactly what is being harvested when and where you have some gaps that you can fill.

OK, so let's do a quick recap.

A harvest window is the time that you can harvest a crop once it starts.

Planning by harvest windows means that you plan your eating 1st and then you plan your plantings backwards from there.

The three strategies for continuous harvest are repeat plantings at intervals, different varieties with different maturity timing, and then relay planting of follow on crops to keep the space in production.

The harvest window grid turns these ideas into a plan that you can actually use and your plan gets better every year when you record your first and last harvest dates.

All right, and that's it for today.

In the show notes, I'm going to link to a bunch of different research based extension resources that talk about the continuous harvest scheduling and succession sewing or relay planting, all these things.

I am also going to link to the episodes that I have done on succession planting and intercropping, which we didn't really touch on today, but it's a part of that relay planting.

And now I'll give you more information on how you can achieve this without absolutely losing your mind.

Until next time, my gardening friends, keep on cultivating that dream garden, and we'll talk again soon.