Boy are we glad to see our celery seedlings popping up! These are definitely one of our favorite passion crops and we’re nearing the end of the right time to get them sowed!
If you’ve never grown home grown celery before, it’s an absolute treat. We find it hard to believe how commercial growers manage to make celery so boring and tasteless. The home grown variants of celery will knock your socks off for flavor and it’s one of the reasons we focus on growing many celery plants for a substantial preservation effort.
Celery are notorious for both germinating slowly and growing painfully slowly. While your other plants will be racing towards adulthood, celery definitely take their time. This is the reason they are sowed so early in the season, they just take forever. But, they make for an excellent cold climate crop to grow in the northern garden.
But, once they get a bit more mature, you’ll see them start to take off. It always seems like one day you go from having celery transplants in the garden to actual celery plants. And you’re all like, “Oh, hey, where’d you come from?”
Celery are one of those crops that will take the entire season to produce. Though you can sneak a few stalks early, we need every bit of our 100+ growing days to eek out quality stalks. They’re also quite cold tolerant, too, so you can use some of that late post frost season to get them just a little bit bigger.
We usually grow at least a couple different kinds of celery. Lately, our green variant has been the renowned Utah variety, but we aren’t necessarily loyal to that variety. We also grow a “color” variant, typically red or pink. This gives us huge visual distinction in our preserved celery, we typically just mix it all together for beautiful additions to those winter meals.
We’ll continue to be patient with our plants, giving them all the time they need to get established! But, they’re looking good so far!
