I’ve chosen to grow celery because we all uniformly love to eat it and because it seemed like a good challenge for a beginner. I’ve heard it was a bit of a demanding vegetable and I wanted to satisfy my hunger for knowledge. Well, it proved to be not as demanding as I expected (except from requiring a lot of water - it really dislikes dry soil), as long as you don’t expect your homegrown organic celery to look like some of the fat ones you can find in shops these days. The taste will still be as good if not better, but those stalks will likely not look as broad and swollen with water.
If you’re main purpose is eating raw celery sticks, bear in mind this may be limited to the stalks located nearer the centre of your plant (although not in the exact centre), which tend to be thicker, particularly if you employ the cut-and-come-again method, whereby you cut or snap off the outer stalks and leave the rest of the plant to grow on. The first cut will give you many thin stalks which work perfectly in stews and soups of all sorts, or in homemade vegetable stock, but next time you’ll get some thicker ones.
How we grow it:
We chose a self-blanching variety called Golden. Self-blanching celery is easier to grow as it does not require any techniques to block away sunlight. It’s nevertheless a good idea to grow them packed tightly together, which means planting about 8-9 inches apart. Our variety gave us a very reliable crop. I now understand that the demanding bit lies in the initial phase of growing, as celery takes a long time to get going.
We’ve sown multiple seeds all into one module filled with general purpose compost that we had sieved to obtain a lighter, finer medium. The setup is identical to lettuce, where you scatter seeds, wait till they’ve sprouted and then prick them out one by one into separate module cells. But celery takes much longer to sprout and the subsequent growth is much slower, so you need patience. Our plants took in excess of 6 months to reach maturity, we’ve sown them on 2 April and started harvesting in late October.
Seven weeks after sowing we pricked individual seedlings into modules. We could have done that earlier but frankly I was afraid I’d damage the tiny sprouts, they are indeed tiny. It proved to work just fine. I find that burying the pricked seedlings deeper then they were initially (as per Charles Dowding’s suggestions on his Youtube channel) really helps them establish well.
We planted the celery out another 4 weeks later, in mid June, into a raised bed that had just been emptied of early potatoes. 8 inches apart, in a diamond pattern. At that stage we had to water them every day due to very hot and dry weather and the quality of the compost (drying up quickly, not well decomposed, though it worked great for potatoes).
A month later we were leaving on holiday and to prevent too much evaporation we’ve mulched the entire ground underneath them with a thick layer of dry leaf mulch. This meant our kind parents only had to water them once a week while we were gone. They survived and looked strong upon our return! Mulching is a great drylands strategy, but don’t let the mulch touch the veg, as that can lead to many problems of the growing stems.
Our celery seems very resistant to any disease and pests. After a very dry summer it received an onslaught of very wet autumn and had a limited few aphids that seemed to have gone on their own. It is now getting a few leaf spots here and there, due to excessive dampness I think, but we remove the affected leaves and the plants still look healthy and strong.
In total we grew 9 celery plants. We gave 3 whole-harvested plants away to friends and family. We’re now left with 6 plants still in the ground. We harvest only the external stalks as and when needed, around twice per week. We intend to continue this way and check if they can stand our winter. So far we’ve only had one weak frost back in October, otherwise it’s been very mild but very rainy.
How we eat it:
Although my children and I enjoy eating crunchy raw celery sticks, we don’t get to do that too often with this year’s harvest, the stalks being thinner and not as watery. We still do that a little bit. I’ve also discovered, completely by accident, my children love eating diced celery FROZEN. They will actually take it out of the freezer and snack on it. But for the most part, our celery is a wonderful base vegetable in most of our stews, stir-fries and soups.
In a recent lamb and chard stew, the celery proved a wonderful partner for chard. I've realised I prefer combining chard with celery in any recipe calling for chard (roughly 60% chard and 40% celery). That plus a spoon or two of vinegar (or lemon juice) makes me feel like I like chard a lot more than I usually do!
Obviously we also put celery in almost any soup, and it is absolutely necessary in a warming autumnal chicken soup. You can definitely use the more leafy parts of the vegetable, which you can then take out at the end of cooking, once they’ve lent all their flavour and goodness to the broth.
We love to get even more basic and use the least attractive parts to cook and can some vegetable stock, which makes any subsequent soup or sauce more flavourful and of course more nutritious. I like to make my veg stock on the otherwise discardable parts of celery and leek, plus some charred onion. It’s wonderful!
If you think you’d benefit an actual recipe or two using this vegetable, have a look at the ones linked under this article, we try to keep them simple and focused on saving energy, too!
The most satisfying discovery we've made about celery is the fact that it does not need to be harvested out of the ground whole. It's a vegetable that keeps on giving, at least until the weather gets too cold. But since it's a slow grower, it makes sense to start it off early in the growing season. Next year, we'll be sowing it towards the end of February, around 10 weeks before the average last frost date for our area.
Enjoy your growing!
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