Growing Celery In Your Garden

If you have a hotbed frame, or a hand light, the thing is easy. A large flower pot will bring up out of ground, plants enough for any family. As soon as the plants are three inches high, and it scarcely matters how thick they stand, make a nice little bed in open free air; make the ground rich and the earth very fine. Here prick out the plants at 4 inches apart; and, of course, 9 in a square foot.

They are so very small, that this must be carefully done; and they should be gently watered once, and shaded 2 days. A bed 10 feet long and 4 wide will contain 360 plants: and, if they be well cultivated, they are more than any common sized family can want from November till May.

In this bed the plants stand till the middle of July, or thereabouts, when they are to go out into trenches. Make the trenches a foot deep and a foot wide, and put them not less than five feet asunder. The ground that you make the trenches in should not be fresh dug; but be in a solid state, which very conveniently may be; for Celery comes on just as the Peas and early Cabbages and Cauliflowers have gone off.

Lay the earth that you take out in the middle of the space between the trenches, so that it may not be washed into them by the heavy rains; for it will, in such case, cover the hearts of the plants, and will go very nearly to destroy them.

When you have made your trench, put along it some good rich compost manure, partly consisting of wood ashes. Not dung; or, at least, not dung fresh from the yard; for, if you use that, the celery will be rank and pipy, and will not keep nearly so long or so well.

Dig this manure in, and break all the earth very fine as you go. Then take up your plants, and trim off the long roots. You will find, that every plant has offsets to it, coming up by the side of the main stem. Pull all these off, and leave
only the single stem. Cut the leaves off so as to leave the whole plant about six inches long.

Plant them, six inches apart, and fix them in the manner so minutely dwelt on under the article, Cabbage, keeping, as you are at work, your feet close to the outside edges of the trench. Do not water the plants; and, if you plant in fresh dug' ground, and fix your plants well, none of the troublesome and cumbrous business of shading is at all necessary; for the plant is naturally hardy, and, f it has heat to wither it above, it has also that heat beneath to cause its roots to strike out almost instantly.

When the plants begin to grow, which they quickly will do, hoe on each side and between them with a small hoe. As they grow up, earth their stems; that is, put the earth up to them, but not too much at a time; and let the earth that you pull up be finely broken, and not at all cloddy.

While you do this, keep the stalks of the outside leaves close up to prevent the earth from getting between the stems of the outside leaves and the inner ones; for, if it get there it checks the plant and makes the celery bad.

When you begin the earthing take first the edges of the trenches; and do not go into the middle of the intervals for the earth that you took out of the trenches. Keep working backwards, time after time, that is earthing after earthing, till you come to the earth that you dug out of the trenches; and, by this time the earth against the plants will be above the level of the land. Then you take the earth out of the middle, till, at last the earth against the plants form a ridge and the middle of each interval a sort of gutter.

Earth up very often, and not put much at a time. Every week a little earth to be put up. Thus, in October, you will have four ridges of Celery across one of the Plats, each containing 168 plants. I shall suppose one of these ridges to be wanted for use before the frost sets in for good. Leave another ridge to be lock up by the frost, a much safer guardian than your cellar or barn door.

But, you must cover this ridge over in such a way that the wet will not get down into the hearts of the celery. Two boards, a foot wide each, their edges on one side laid upon the earth of the ridge, formed into a roof over the point of the ridge, the upper edge of one board going an inch over the upper edge of the other, and the boards fastened well with pegs, will do the business completely; for it is not the frost, but the occasional thaws that you have to fear, and the wet and rot that they produce.

For the celery that is to serve from the setting in to the breaking up of the frost, you must have a bed of sand, or light earth, in a warm part of a barn, or in a cellar; and there you must lay it in, row after row, not covering the points of the leaves.

To have seed, take one plant, in spring, out of the ridge left in the garden. Plant it in an open place, and you will have seed enough to serve a whole township. For soup, the seed bruised is as good as the plant itself.

Learn about grass care and planting grass seed at the Plants And Flowers site.