Celery is a great crop; it contains lots of good stuff like antioxidants, vitamins and minerals and even has anti-inflammatory properties. It can be consumed hot or cold, raw or cooked and we go through quite a bit of it. The downside is that celery is a slow grower and does not integrate well into our bed system in the conventional manner ie interspersed with other crops like lettuce, brassicas and tomatoes. This is because you are just starting to harvest some immature stalks and it is time for the chooks to come on and clean the patch ready for replanting, but I have come up with an answer that works for us.
If celery is planted some time before the winter solstice it will go to seed as the weather warms up during the following spring. What we have found is that if we sow in late winter early spring we can get almost a full year of harvest before the celery bolts up to seed. In terms of culture we do not blanch the celery by covering up the stems to excuse light, nor do we harvest the entire plant. To spread the harvest we cut the outside stems as they mature, slice them up and put them into dishes, leaving the inner leaves and steps of the parent plant intact.
Celery has very small seed; certainly it is the smallest vegetable seed I have ever come across, and it germinates very slowly, sometimes taking as long as 3 weeks to a month. I use our standard process and place the seed in one cell of a punnet with the other cells containing seed for other veggies due to be sown that fortnight, which is then placed in the greenhouse. What usually happens is that the other seeds sprout first and are potted on, with the “celery cell” looking bare but don’t be fooled and toss it out! After a while the celery sprouts into tiny seedlings which require a few weeks to get to the transplant stage at which time they can be potted on into newspaper pots and then planted out into the beds after few more weeks of growth.
Rather than include them in the usual rotation, last year I set aside one of the 1.2 x 2 metre beds to grow slower growing stuff and used it for celery and capsicum. I put in eleven celery plants (a row of four followed by a row of three and then another row of four) across the front of the bed about 30 centimetres apart from each other. Even though only 7 plants are still kicking as I write this, they provided enough celery to contribute towards a meal twice a week or so since late spring last year. This year I will be trying the same trick but planting more and somewhat earlier, I have 20 plants ready to go in when they are big enough and will probably put them in early spring.
We particularly enjoy celery in our rocket stove egg and veggie stir fries and my world famous veggie patties. If you are giving my rotating bed system a go, try this idea for celery and see if it works for you too.
