Successive plantings

I used to be rather naive about successive plantings. I always thought of successive plantings as being a second of the same crop being planted after the first harvest. This is how it's normally presented and how it's done on commercial farms. For the home garden, successive plantings can mean staggered plantings of the same crop. That way, you have multiple harvests of the same crop spread out almost continuously over months, rather than one big harvest of a crop.

For this reasoning, I started more cabbage, broccoli and spinach today. The corn is growing well over the spinach mound, so will provide shade to keep it going longer. Be really cool if I can keep the spinach growing all summer, since it can be harvested every few days. I had already started more corn plants of different types, so transplanted about 15 more plants out today. So I have several successive plantings of corn going now. I also have two types of pumpkin going at different planting dates. I'll plant more in a few weeks, so they should be getting ready to harvest around the holidays.

Not sure what to expect with companion planting the corn for shade. I have more pea plants coming up. If they get enough shade from the corn, I may be able to keep them going all summer. Not really counting on it but hoping. They're going pretty good now. My daughter helped me pick the first small harvest this weekend and lots more coming along.

The previously bare mounds are now coming to life since the ammonia and vinegar treatment. Where I treated mounds with live plants, I did burn a few things but most are recovering. Maybe I didn't inject it deep enough, so later treatments will go deeper.

Had to transplant the remaining tomato plants into larger pots this week. Currently have about 34-35 tomato plants going. Trying to get the roots going as deep as possible before planting them out this time. That seems to be a good choice with any taller plants in the desert. Many plants will develop roots along the stem if you successively plant them deeper over multiple transplants. Since the surface soil dries so quickly and loses nutrients so fast in the desert, it makes sense to develop the root systems to go as deep as you can get them to go. So, I'm doing much the same with other things as well. Corn, pumpkin and anything with a distance between the root and first leaves are getting transplanted up to the first leaves with each transplant, then once more when they go into the soil. Seems to be a tactic which is working well.