by Jennifer Poindexter
What’s your favorite healthy snack? For me, it’s ants on a log. If you haven’t heard of this, it’s another name for celery with peanut butter, finished off with raisins. It’s delicious, filling, and contains quite a few nutrients. If you love this type of snack, you should consider raising your own celery.
However, be mindful of typical mistakes gardeners make when raising this vegetable. If you don’t know what they are, you’re in the right place. I’m going to share the top mistakes of growing celery, and I’ll share the solutions as well. Here’s what you should avoid when adding celery to your garden.
1. Don’t Limit Your Growing Methods for Celery
Regardless of where you live and how much space you have, there’s a method you can use for growing celery.
Take your time to study each growing method, and figure out which method is the best for your overall goals. Your growing method may also be determined by the amount of sunlight you have in your growing space.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
This mistake is avoided by educating yourself. You can grow celery in an inground garden plot or raised bed. It can be grown from seed or seedlings.
However, you can also use the base from a bunch of celery, you purchased, from the grocery store. Plant it in a container, and it will sprout more celery stalks.
If you’d like to grow enough celery to avoid the grocery store, growing it from seed or seedling might be your best bet.
Yet, if you’re looking to save money and grow food from what you already have on hand, sprouting vegetable scraps could be a great method for you as well.
2. Forgetting to Water Celery
Celery loves water. It’s vital to ensuring the plant grows as it should and remains healthy. It also can impact the flavor of your crop.
Forgetting to water celery could be enough to destroy all your hard work. Avoid this mistake to create a positive growing experience with this vegetable.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
Celery has a small root system and prefers for the soil to be consistently damp. The secret is the soil shouldn’t become overly saturated.
Therefore, you should water the soil lightly each day. This will be enough to keep it moist without overpowering the plant.
If you don’t keep the moisture in the soil regulated, and allow the plants to dry out, the celery will have a bitter taste at harvest.
Avoid this from happening by ensuring celery receives the moisture it needs. Mulching around your celery could be another way to help regulate the moisture in the soil, too.
3. Forgetting to Fertilize Celery
When you consider which plants in your garden are heavy feeders, celery may not be the first crop to come to mind.
However, celery is considered a heavy feeder. It also has small roots which can limit how many nutrients it can absorb at a time. Take this into consideration when avoiding this dreadful mistake.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
You can avoid this mistake by fertilizing your celery every week. This will ensure fresh nutrients are always within reach of this plant.
Also, since celery is green, you should know it loves nitrogen. The more vibrant the green color is, the more nutritious it is for you.
Therefore, ensure you supply a balanced fertilizer each week. If the celery is losing its color, be sure to add more nitrogen to the soil.
4. Planting Celery When It’s Hot
One of the biggest mistakes you can make, when growing celery, is planting when the temperature is too warm.
Celery is a cool weather crop. If you live in a warmer planting zone, like I do, your window of growth time might be smaller than other regions. Take this into consideration to avoid this mishap.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
When planting celery, the temperatures should be between 40- and 50-degrees Fahrenheit. As celery grows, the temperatures shouldn’t be above 60- to 70-degrees Fahrenheit.
Beyond these temperatures, the plant will bolt. If the temperatures dip below 40-degrees Fahrenheit, it can cause the plant to bolt as well.
There’s an obvious balance with this plant. If you grow it when the temperatures aren’t within the recommended ranges, it could impact the growth of your plant or the flavor of your harvest.
5. Weeding Your Celery Patch Incorrectly
Did you know there’s a right way and a wrong way to weed your garden? When it comes to certain crops, there definitely is!
For vegetables with small or shallow roots, you can easily disrupt the plant if you pull weeds too aggressively. Avoid this mistake to save your celery harvest.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
You can avoid this mistake in two different ways. The first method is to apply mulch around your celery crop.
This will not only keep the soil, around your celery, cool and moist, but it will also help deter weeds from growing in your celery beds.
If you still have weeds popping up, pull them gently to avoid damaging your celery plant. However, don’t ever let the weeds take over the area.
Weeds will cause your celery plants to compete for nutrients. Since celery is a heavy feeder, this could be detrimental.
Plus, weeds can become a place for pests and diseases to hide. Skip all these issues by keeping weeds out of your garden while ensuring you don’t harm your plants in the process.
6. Ignoring Pests and Diseases
There are few plants which don’t have enemies in the garden. Celery is a plant which you must stay on top of pests and diseases.
If not, you could lose your whole harvest. By understanding what threats await this plant, you’ll better understand how to treat or stay ahead of them.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
The most common pests which threaten celery are flea beetles, slugs, snails, and earwigs. Most of these pests can be treated with an insecticide.
Be sure to read the labels to know you’re applying a treatment to your plant which will treat every problem you’re dealing with.
The most common diseases are fungal diseases such as wilt, blight, Fusarium yellows, and rot. Fusarium yellows has no cure.
Therefore, the plants should be destroyed and not composted to avoid further spreading the disease. Other fungal diseases can be treated with a fungicide, watering less, and increasing airflow around the plants.
Bacterial blight, bacterial leaf spot, and mosaic virus may also impact celery. There’s no cure for mosaic virus. Therefore, the plants must be destroyed and should not be composted to stop the spread of the virus.
Other bacterial issues can be treated by removing infected parts of the plant and keeping soil from the foliage of your plants. Be sure to wash all gardening equipment to avoid spreading diseases from plant to plant.
If soil borne disease continues in your celery bed, it might be best to garden in raised beds or containers. This will allow you to solarize the soil or bring in fresh soil to avoid bacterial diseases.
7. Picking Celery Incorrectly
Did you know there’s a correct way to harvest most vegetables? If you don’t harvest them at the right time, or use the right method, you can waste your labor.
Don’t fall into this trap with celery. Instead, learn the optimal time for harvest and the correct methods to use.
How to Avoid this Mistake:
You should water your celery plants heavily, prior to harvesting, the day you’re planning on picking the crop.
Once you have watered the plants, you can use shears to remove a stalk at a time, or you can dig up the entire plant for use.
This will depend upon how much celery you’re planning on using at a single time. Be sure to use shears to remove stalks. Avoid peeling them to deter any damage to the plant.
These are the top mistakes many gardeners make when raising celery. By understanding what you shouldn’t do, when growing this crop, it gives you a greater chance at success.
Hopefully, these insights can save you a few headaches during the gardening season and help you to start adding healthier snacks to your diet, by growing the ingredients at home.
More About Growing Celery
https://extension.usu.edu/yardandgarden/research/celery-in-the-garden
http://blogs.ifas.ufl.edu/charlotteco/2020/03/14/stalking-celery/
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