Garden-to-table success starts with strategic planning and succession planting—staggering crops like romaine lettuce (two seedlings weekly) ensures continuous harvests. Nursery-started seedlings save up to five weeks of grow time and reduce garden space needs by 33%. Prioritize versatile herbs (cilantro, green onions) and low-maintenance vegetables (tomatoes, cucumbers) for maximum kitchen utility. Harvest lettuce early to prevent bitterness and bolting, typically within 45-50 days.
A well-planned garden bridges the gap between homegrown produce and daily meals, addressing food security and sustainability. Cultivator Connections, with 20+ years of urban farming expertise, helps home growers optimize space and yield through data-driven techniques. This guide covers succession planting strategies, space-efficient nursery methods, and harvest timing to maximize productivity.
We’ll explore how to align planting schedules with harvest frequency, select high-impact crops, and maintain soil health through rotations. You’ll learn to design a year-round garden that delivers fresh ingredients weekly, reducing grocery costs and waste.
By implementing these techniques, you’ll transform your garden into a reliable food source, ensuring a steady supply of homegrown produce tailored to your culinary needs.
By Matthew
TL;DR – Quick Summary
Discover the secrets to a year-round, productive garden that keeps your plate full of fresh, homegrown produce.
Succession Planting: Succession planting ensures a steady flow of ingredients by staggering plantings based on the days to harvest, such as planting two romaine seedlings every week for a continuous supply of lettuce.
Nursery Efficiency: For space efficiency, use a nursery to start seedlings, saving up to five weeks of grow time and reducing the space needed in your main garden by up to 33%.
Herb Versatility: Herbs like cilantro and green onions are the most versatile and impactful, enhancing a wide range of dishes from stir-fries to salsas.
Tomato Cucumbers: Tomatoes and cucumbers are rock-solid choices for vegetables due to their ease of harvest and minimal processing, making them perfect for quick meals.
Lettuce Harvesting: Harvest lettuce early to avoid bitterness and bolting, which can occur when the plant sends up a flower stalk, typically within 45-50 days of planting.
Pro tip: To maximize your garden’s productivity, plan your planting schedule around your harvest frequency, ensuring you have enough space for multiple successions and regular rotations.
Introduction to Garden to Table: Planning and Harvesting
Matthew: Matthew Enloe: Hi everybody, welcome to Cultivator Connections. I’m Matthew Enlow, the host of this podcast. And today we’re gonna be talking about garden to table. So the idea is how do you… plan and grow, harvest, clean, cook, the stuff that you’re growing in your garden. You’ll see that we’re in the greenhouse today, one of our greenhouses here.
It’s November 20th and the weather’s starting to cool down. So we put our greenhouse covers on like last week. As the weather starts to cool down, especially at night, all of our little seedlings, they start growing slowly and they don’t like when the temperature drops below like 45 degrees, 50 degrees. They start slowing down and not being as healthy, but we put the greenhouse covers on from… November end of October November all the way through to March when it starts heating up here in Southern, California So yeah the topic for today is garden to table What we want to do is we want to make sure that y’all have Have all that you need To get that To get that garden plan going so that you’re eating what’s coming out of the garden That’s one of my biggest things as long as I’ve been helping people grow their own food is I want to make sure that I’m giving people the direction that they need So that what they grow in their garden ends up on a plate so if Like our mission is to help people grow food where they live learn work and eat if All of the plants that they’re growing end up as compost or end up overgrown That’s not really us fulfilling our mission as a company.
It has to actually end up on a plate to be food. Otherwise, you’re just grown edible plants.
So I really want to dig in today on a couple of high level topics with planning, harvesting, cleaning, and and then even like preparation post harvest practices. How do you make sure that what you’re putting on your plate is healthy, clean and delicious. So I’ve got some notes and just to keep me on track. So I’ll start with the first topic, which is… Let me just read it real quick. Alright, how do you plan your garden so that you’re not getting everything all at once, but you’re having a steady flow of ingredients?
Succession Planting for Continuous Harvest
Matthew: What this is called in the gardening world, farming world, is succession planting. What that requires is for you to have an understanding of the life cycle of the plant and the days to harvest. On the back of every seed packet and also on the description on our website of every plant that we sell, we have some guidance on how long it’s gonna be from either seed to harvest or seedling to harvest. And so as you’re planning out what you’re putting into your garden, if you’re a beginner grower, you’re probably just going to be throwing stuff into the garden that you like or you think it’s interesting. That’s great. But. when you’re going to really try to increase that productivity, make sure that you’re eating as much as you can out of your garden, succession planting is the term that you’re gonna use to guide your planting plans. So what succession planting means is that you’re not planting all at once. A good example is lettuces.
I eat lettuce every week, and if you think about it, if I’m eating lettuce every week, that means I probably should be planting lettuce every week. In Southern California, we can do that year round. In some other places where it gets too hot or too cold, you might have to switch that lettuce out for a different leafy green. some areas it’s getting really cold and the hardy brassicas are going to be able to tolerate the cold a little bit better this time of year. So growing seasonally is and adjusting your cooking. is a way if you can’t grow year round where you are, to sort of adjust your planting plan so that you are doing that succession planting.
So an example of succession planting is I know that it’s 45 days to harvest from this seedling of romaine. I’m going to put in two, so give myself a fighting chance, I’m going to put in two romaine seedlings into my garden bed or into my hydroponic tower and then if I can I’m doing that every week and I’m putting two in, two in, two in and then by the fifth or sixth week I’m pulling out that first harvest. and replanting in the same space or in a new empty space. Sometimes it’s nice to leave in a soil garden some space empty for a little while, even a week or two just gives the soil a rest and you can amend it. You can put in some compost after each grow cycle. The amendment side is a different conversation, but that succession planting is whatever frequency I’m planning to grow in, to harvest, whatever frequency I’m planning to harvest, I’m planting at that same frequency. So from a planning perspective, I’m gonna need to allocate that amount of space in my garden. so that I can do that many successions.
A five week variety of lettuce, five, six weeks, means I need enough space for two heads of lettuce every week for six weeks. So let’s say that’s half a square foot for two heads of lettuce. I need to multiply that by six. and that gives me three square feet of growing area to plant lettuce every week. If you’re growing from seed, you’ll need more space. That’s one of the benefits of seedlings is that they take so little space. So 72 plants of this Swiss chard are growing in, you know, one and a half square feet right here.
Having that space efficiency means that I don’t have to take up that space in my grow out area, whether or not that’s a tower or a or growing in the ground. If you have an abundance of space for urban farmers like us, space is the premium. So having a nursery operation really helps to maximize that space because you don’t have that germination time that two, three, four weeks. This Swiss chard was planted almost four, three weeks ago now, and it’ll be ready the week after next. So that’s five weeks of bed space that we’re saving. by starting in a nursery. And even if you were to do your own nursery at home, you’re gonna reduce the amount of space, but still be able to plant seeds every week so that you only need that grow out period.
So we cut off five weeks of growing. by putting it in the nursery where we can plant more densely. And then we only need four or five succession spaces. So instead of all that time for that head of lettuce that we’re talking about, you might need instead of three square feet, you might need four, five square feet of growing area in your soil garden. in order to have that same cycle of lettuce coming out every week. So that’s the sort of idea that we want to get into where we’re staggering, planting.
We’re constantly putting our inputs into the garden so that we can take out what comes out of it. If you plant everything all at once, then your garden is going to be very dramatic boom and bust cycles. You can make it go a little further if you’re doing, for instance, leaf harvests off of your bok choy, off of your hydroponic tower. you put in six bok choy and you’re harvesting off the leaves off of those six plants over the course of four weeks. So that’s like a different way.
Maximizing Garden Space and Rotation
Matthew: It’s not succession planting, but it’s you’re using your harvesting approach to get multiple harvests. Whereas you could have an alternate option is those large outer leaves that you’re harvesting off of six plants every week, you could have been putting one bok choy in every week into each port and be on a cycle where one’s going in every week. So that’s succession planting and that keeps you in rotation. It doesn’t have to be that dramatic for a home gardener. This is what we’re doing for some of our larger in-person service customers. We’re showing up with 36 romaine lettuces, which is a half of one of our trays. and we’re showing up every week and we’re replanting two hydroponic towers. 36 or…
Like we have a site that has 33 towers. So we end up bringing two trays to plant out three towers because they’re really tall and they 44 plants each. So we’re bringing romaine every week and we’re harvesting, planting and harvesting romaine so they have a steady flow into their dining halls at a school. For a home grower, you’re not gonna be doing that as much, but it might mean that you are doing your nursery work every other week.
And then as things are done in the nursery, you’re planting them into the garden and pulling them out. If you’re, for instance, buying plants online from us, it might mean placing an order once a month. And… and then making sure that you’re harvesting, you’re staying on a rotation. It’s all about that rotation to maximize your garden space and make sure that you’re not leaving things in the garden too long because you’ve invested so much time and emotion into that, into those plants where you actually let them go too long and they’re not delicious anymore. So that’s how I think about maximizing the amount of food that’s going to come out of a garden. It’s that planning, that planning the successions, planting more frequently and harvesting more frequently, and then allocating the amount of space based on the number of successions that you’re going to do. You have something that you’re planning to come out in five weeks, and six weeks, and seven weeks, and eight weeks. So you’re gonna be planting on week one, two, and three. Those are the successions. Next topic is, I’m just reading it.
High-Impact Herbs, Greens, and Vegetables for Cooking
Matthew: Alright, what combination of herbs, greens, and vegetables have the biggest impact in my everyday cooking? Herbs, for me, is really obvious and it sort of shows in the popularity of what we grow. It’s cilantro, green onions, followed up by parsley, and then getting into dill, and then we start working our way back. green onion and cilantro, they can be used across so many different cuisines across the globe. So you can have a lot of diversity in your dishes from those green onions and cilantro. You can make everything from a stir-fry to a salsa. with cilantro. So green onions and cilantro are what I find to be the two most impactful herbs in getting the food from the garden onto the plate.
Vegetables changes seasonally, but tomatoes and cucumbers, those are rock solid. It’s really easy. which we’ll get into some of the post-harvest practices, it’s really easy to get them off of the vine and onto a plate. There’s very few steps that it takes to actually get them there, especially because they are commonly eaten raw. As far as greens go, I gotta go with arugula and kale. Arugula and kale, they break down super easy. They take very minimal processing and they can just end up in a salad. And then obviously there’s lettuces. Lettuces all day, super useful. You just gotta make sure that you’re harvesting them on time before they get too big, overgrown, and potentially they bolt. They send up a long center stalk that has a flower.
That’s what happens when the lettuce goes too long. ever walking through a garden and or maybe your own garden and you see your lettuce is looking really tall and maybe even starts to have like a cone shape going upwards with lots of smaller leaves that your lettuce is bolting. It’s trying to put up a flower because it’s at the end of its life cycle and it’s ready to do what it started out its life doing which is reproduce. Make another set of seeds so that the next generation can come along. At that point, the lettuce tends to be very bitter. It’s still edible. It tastes more like a chicory, like an endive, or an escarole. But… it’s very bitter and it’s not the lettuce that you were expecting. So it’s important to get your lettuce. I like to get my lettuce even on the early side. It tends to like, I like it nice and tender and I like getting it straight from the garden onto a plate. Again, foreshadowing for the post-harvest practice, which we’ll get into. Next topic, which I have a calendula right here to about is edible flowers.
Further reading: Herb Varieties & Uses: Holy Basil vs. Italian.