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).
Days between sowings, and what it buys you
LETTUCE, SOWN EVERY 12 DAYS
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.
Interplanting and relay planting
Interplanting uses the gaps around slow crops: radishes and lettuce sown between young broccoli or tomatoes are harvested before the big plants fill in.
Relay planting puts the next crop in before the current one finishes - for example, setting fall broccoli transplants between the last rows of bush beans, so the bed is never empty.
Working out the last sowing date
For fall crops, count back from your first frost date: the days to maturity, plus about two weeks because growth slows as the days shorten, plus however long you want to be harvesting.
A 50-day lettuce you want to pick for two weeks needs sowing about 70-80 days before the first frost. Hardy crops such as kale, spinach and turnips can be pushed later, because they carry on through light frosts. See the fall and winter garden guide.
Keep it manageable
Short rows are the secret. A three-foot row of lettuce every two weeks feeds a household better than a twenty-foot row once.
Keep the seed packet and a marker by the bed so the next sowing takes two minutes, put a reminder in your phone, and work an inch of compost into each space before it is resown.
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.
Common questions
How often should I succession plant lettuce?
Every 10-14 days in spring and fall. In summer heat lettuce bolts quickly, so switch to heat-tolerant varieties in part shade or pause until late summer and start again for fall.
What vegetables should not be succession planted?
Long-season crops that hold the bed all summer anyway: tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, winter squash, pumpkins, Brussels sprouts, leeks and main-crop onions. Plant those once, at the right time.
When should I stop succession planting?
Stop spring sowings of cool-season crops a few weeks after the last frost, before summer heat makes them bolt. Stop fall sowings when there are not enough days left for the crop to mature before your first frost, with about a two-week buffer.
Does succession planting wear out the soil?
Growing more crops in a season does use more nutrients. Work in an inch of compost or a balanced organic fertilizer between plantings, and rotate crop families, to keep the bed productive.