Succession planting for a continuous harvest
Last reviewed September 2026 · written from public-domain USDA/NOAA data and Cooperative Extension references — see how we source data
Succession planting is simply not sowing everything at once. Done well it turns a two-week glut into two months of steady picking and keeps beds full from spring to frost.
Four ways to succession plant
Same crop, staggered: sow a short row of lettuce, beans, or radishes every 1–3 weeks.
Same crop, different maturities: plant early, mid, and late sweet corn varieties on the same day.
Different crops, same space: follow spring peas with summer beans, then fall spinach in the same bed.
Cool–warm–cool: a spring cool-season crop, a summer warm-season crop, and a fall cool-season crop in one season.
Spacing the sowings
A useful rule: sow the next batch when the previous one has its first true leaves. In practice that is about every 7–10 days for radish and salad leaves, every 2 weeks for beans, bush lettuce and carrots, and every 3 weeks for cucumbers and summer squash.
Stop spring sowings of cool crops a few weeks after the last frost — they bolt in heat. Restart them in late summer for fall. Stop fall sowings when there is no longer time to mature before frost (plus a buffer for hardy crops that keep going through light frost).
Best crops for it
Radish, arugula, lettuce and other loose-leaf greens, spinach, bush beans, beets, carrots, cilantro, dill, kohlrabi, turnips, and cucumbers and summer squash (a second sowing also dodges the first squash vine borer generation).
Poor candidates: anything that occupies the ground all season anyway — tomatoes, peppers, winter squash, Brussels sprouts, leeks, main-crop onions.
Planning it
The succession planting planner turns a crop, a start date and an end date into a dated list of sowings at the right interval.