With a little planning, staggered planting can help your home garden provide fresh vegetables for weekly meals without everything coming ready at once.

When you open a packet of vegetable seeds, there are often more seeds than you need for one planting. Not every seed germinates and pests may eat seedlings so it always pays to sow a few extras. Sow seeds in fresh Daltons Premium Seed Raising Mix, which is used and trusted by commerical growers.

Stagger your planting

Once seedlings are large enough to handle, they can be “pricked out”, which means gently lifting and transplanting them into seed trays or small pots – use an ice block stick or teaspoon.

This gives them more room to grow and lets you hold some seedlings back before planting them into the vegetable garden. This is a useful way to stagger plantings, as you do not have to plant every seedling into the garden on the same day. Instead, you can plant a few at a time, so your vegetables do not all mature at once.
 

Plan around what your family eats

The number of plants you need will depend on:

•    the size of your vegetable garden
•    how many people you are feeding
•    the time of year
•    which vegetables your family enjoys
•    whether the crop is picked once or harvested over several weeks

There is no perfect number for every household, so start with the vegetables you use most often and adjust as you learn what grows well and what gets eaten.

It is also a good idea to grow a mix of vegetables for both salads and cooked meals, so the garden supports different meals through the week.

Vegetables that keep producing

Some vegetables, such as silverbeet and spinach, can be picked regularly over time rather than harvested all at once. With these crops, there is less need to keep replanting new seedlings as often, because you can harvest the outer leaves and let the plant continue growing.