Gadenin日本語Get the appThe shape of the season
The whole crop runs on a simple arc. Sow into warm soil, thin twice, top the plant once it is knee-high, then harvest tips on a fortnightly rhythm until cold weather ends it. Everything else is maintenance: water, feed, and take flower buds out on sight.
There are only four decisions in the year that materially change what you get. Whether you waited for 60F (15C) soil. Whether you thinned to a real spacing. Whether you topped the plant early. And whether you kept the flower buds off. Everything else in this guide is refinement around those four.
Timings below are given against frost and soil temperature rather than dates, so they read the same in either hemisphere. Judge from your own ground.
| Stage | Trigger | Main jobs |
|---|---|---|
| Bed preparation | Two to three weeks before sowing | Dig in 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) of compost. Rake and firm. |
| Sowing | Soil steady above 60F (15C), after last frost | Soak seed, sow a quarter inch (5 mm) deep, mesh the row. |
| Thinning | 2 true leaves, then 6 inches (15 cm) tall | Thin to 4 inches (10 cm), then to 8 inches (20 cm). Eat the thinnings. |
| First topping | Plant 12 inches (30 cm) tall | Pinch the growing point. Water and feed the same day. |
| Main cutting | Every 10 to 14 days in warm weather | Cut tips with 2 to 3 leaves. Pinch out flower buds. |
| Second sowing | 6 to 8 weeks after the first | Fresh tender growth for the cool end of the season. |
| Cut-back | Whenever a plant stretches or flowers | Halve the plant, feed, expect regrowth in 7 to 10 days. |
| Clearing | After the first hard freeze | Harvest sound leaf, remove all fruit and debris from the plot. |
Early season: getting a stand and building a bush
The early weeks are about not losing plants and not letting them run up. Get the mesh on from the day you sow, keep the surface damp until emergence, and thin on time. A row thinned late never catches up, because the seedlings have already stretched competing with each other and will make thin, leaning stems all season.
The single highest-value job in this period is the first topping at 12 inches (30 cm). It feels wrong to cut the top off a plant that is finally growing well, and it is the difference between a crop and a novelty. Water and feed on the same day and side shoots break within a week.
Get a mulch down once plants are six inches (15 cm) tall, keeping it clear of the stems, and strip the lowest three or four leaves as soon as the plant is knee-high. Both jobs are about the same thing: keeping soil off the leaves you will be eating and keeping air moving under the canopy.
Midseason: the cutting months
This is the long, productive stretch that justifies the crop, running right through the heat that finishes lettuce and spinach. The work settles into a repeating round that takes a few minutes per plant. Do it on a fixed day so the interval stays regular; the interval is what keeps the leaves tender.
Watch two things through these weeks. The first is the gap between cuts: if it lengthens while the weather stays warm, feed and water. The second is the appearance of flower buds in the axils, which will start on the driest or most crowded plants first and tells you where the bed needs attention.
Sow again six to eight weeks after the first sowing. The first plants will be increasingly stemmy by late summer, and having young plants coming on means you can afford to cut the old ones back hard without going without.
- Cut tips every 10 to 14 days Take a tip with two or three leaves, cutting just above a leaf pair. Never take more than a third of the plant at once, and leave at least two leaves behind every cut.
- Check the top leaf axils for flower buds Look at the top three or four leaf pairs on every shoot and thumbnail out any cluster of green beads. Doing this at every cut is what keeps the crop going for months.
- Water deeply twice a week in heat One to two inches (2.5 to 5 cm) a week, at the base, in the morning. Check by pushing a finger two inches (5 cm) into the soil between plants before deciding.
- Feed every three to four weeks, and after every hard cut A balanced or nitrogen-leaning liquid feed at label strength. Applied on the day of a hard cut it brings regrowth forward by several days.
- Strip yellow and rust-spotted lower leaves at each round Take them off the plot rather than composting them. This one habit does more for rust than anything you can spray.
Late season: flowers, fruits and clearing up
As the plants age, flowering wins. Cut-backs bring less regrowth, tips come smaller, and buds appear faster than you can pinch them. At that point stop fighting it: pick heavily while the leaf is still worth having, and let the second sowing carry the rest of the season.
Decide now whether you want seed. If you do, leave one or two plants unpinched at the end of the row and let the flat ring-shaped fruits dry to pale brown before cutting the stems into a paper bag. If you do not, cut the clusters off before they set, because the seed has a hard coat, survives the winter in the ground, and comes up as a carpet of volunteers next spring.
The first light frosts do little harm and often improve the flavor, so keep picking. After a hard freeze the tips blacken and the plant is finished. Take a final cut of anything sound, then pull the plants, remove every fruit and every rust-marked leaf from the plot, and write down where the row was so next year's goes somewhere else.
Do not compost stems carrying dry fruits, and do not compost rust-marked leaves. Both come back to you: the seed as volunteers spread with the compost, the rust as an early start next season.