Succession Planting and Crop Maintenance Tips
How to pamper plants, select great crops, pest manage and peek into my garden
Hi Plant Parent
The stage is set for new winter plant performers in my garden theatre this month. You’ll meet one of the stars of the show, the support crew and the highly anticipated and soon-to-debut cast. As always, a few unwelcome villains are trying to steal produce, but I ensure they make a hasty exit! There are lots more tips in store.
Today’s Lineup:
🌟 How to Manage Your Star Performers
🏆 What Makes a Great Crop?
🌶 Celebrity Capsicum - A Star Worth Saving
🧴 How to Pamper Your Productive Plants [Video] 🎥
🌿 Succession Planting for a Continuous Harvest [Video] 🎥
🎬 Behind the Scenes in My Kitchen Garden
🐌 Meet the Villains: Pests that Steal the Spotlight
Shortly, you’ll meet my Celebrity Capsicums - quite the show-offs in bold red costumes and demanding attention! But first, I’ll share how I identify seasonal showstoppers and what to look for in your garden.
How to Manage Your Star Performers
A vital lesson my garden has taught me is to value high-performance plants.
Treat your scene-stealers with star qualities like royalty!
During the growing season, watch how your plants perform. From their debut appearance to the end, when they bow out.
For me, poor performers don’t make the cut. They’re composted, turned into liquid fertiliser or mulch. With limited space, I want the best plants in my garden production.
What Makes a Great Crop?
You’re looking for plants with:
🌱 Flexible harvest times = early pickings or extended stays in the garden.
🛡️ Built-in resistance = little or no trouble from pests and disease.
🌾 Big yields over a long season = more food, more often.
☀️ Resilient in tough weather = drought and heat, no problem.
🍅 Amazing taste + stunning looks = flavour, texture, and colour that wow.
These characters are my VIP’s (Very Important Plants). Like a doting fan, I follow their every move and note their best-performing traits. Many perennials play lead roles in my garden and deliver a stellar performance season after season.
✨Celebrity Capsicum - A Star Worth Saving
As you’ll see in my video, I pamper this capsicum leading lady, as she ticks all the boxes. Some plants deserve a standing ovation to recognise their true worth.
Discover how I support, nurture and protect her fruits, then save seeds.
How to Pamper Your Productive Plants
🛡️ Like a personal security guard, cover the fruit with crop protection bags.
💧 To keep your star performer happy and tantrum-free, offer regular moisture and an occasional seaweed spa to recharge their energy and ensure continuous healthy production. Pampered plants perform!
🌾 Your plants don’t need lattes or five-star meals, but a steady diet of compost, worm castings, liquid mineral boosts, and mulch will keep them thriving.
➕ Use support stakes to prevent heavy fruit from breaking branches.
🐝 Grow flowers to attract a buzzing audience of bees to pollinate fruit.
🌱 Save seeds from your VIPs. In future seasons, they will perform to the same high standard. The gift of seeds from your favourite plant star is their ‘autograph’ - a lasting legacy of this season’s performance that you can replay like an encore in future generations.
👉🏼 Learn how to collect and save 54 vegetable seeds with this easy-to-follow guide.
Succession Planting for a Continuous Harvest
What is it? Why use this strategy? It’s a must-have technique in your toolkit!
In this quick video, I’ll walk you through how I use this method to grow more in less space to squeeze the most out of every square metre - and a few of my favourite speedy growers.
⏳ Short on space, time, or patience? These 17 Fast Growing Vegetables will make sure your plate doesn’t notice!
If you’re ready for planting, dig into my June Gardening Tips.
This Season’s Cast and Crew
As the curtain falls on some crops, others are waiting in the wings for their turn in the spotlight. Broccoli, peas, purple king beans, strawberries and zucchini are soon to make their debut. As I watch their flowers appear, I’m anticipating their harvests.
This month, kale, spinach, eggplant, tomatoes, chillis, capsicums, cucumber, celery, beetroot, coriander, rocket, lettuce, sorrel, nasturtiums, leeks, spring onions, beans, paw paw, herbs, pineapple, citrus and passionfruit are keeping us well fed.
Sweet potato and passionfruit vines have been scaling the rock walls like a vertical playground. I’m tolerating their garden takeover antics during harvest, but their curtain call is coming. They’re due for a serious trim soon before they start trespassing next door.
Behind the Scenes in My Kitchen Garden
I’ve succession planted loose leaf lettuces like cos, butterhead, Romaine and freckles to maximise space and productivity, adding colour and variety to salads. These lettuces never grow to full size. I rotate, picking the large outer leaves daily.
Nutritious edible flowers like pink dianthus and nasturtiums add pops of colour.
The raised beds are stages for leafy greens like sorrel, celery, rocket, spinach and Asian greens, broccoli, leeks, capsicums, chillis, strawberries, flowers and herbs.
Trellises play a supporting role to high-rise aerial performers like cucumbers, peas, beans, wild rocket, ginger, nasturtiums and tomatoes.
Meet the Villains: Pests that Steal the Spotlight
Now and then, we all experience plant losses or pest damage.
🐛 Caterpillars and snails have made a cameo appearance in recent weeks.
🐌 Silver streaked snail trails and a few holey leaves leave no doubt who the culprits are. They sneak out from the moist mulch at night and disappear by morning.
If numbers are out of balance, I sprinkle organic pellets but mostly leave them alone.
A few risk-taking caterpillars made the fatal mistake of eating my Brassicas - and paid the ultimate price. I caught the culprits in the act and left their bodies at the scene of the crime.
Their corpses and lingering scent act as a natural deterrent and warning to passing moth mothers to find a safer nursery!
🐦Thankfully, the birds take care of most. Hero Willy Wagtails and wrens darting in amongst the leaves during the day for a snack are my valued Clean-up Crew.
Lessons Learned …
“Gardening is a team effort. Plants, pollinators and soil life each have a role to play. In this garden production, I’m there behind the scenes, quietly supporting the cast so they can grow their best each season.”
In my living garden theatre, I’m more than a spectator - I’m fully immersed and invested in its success.
Cheering for every new leaf, tying vines to keep performers upright, preparing the soil and celebrating every fruitful harvest.
I embrace this role and the ever-changing backdrop. It’s both humbling and exciting, and I never get bored.
Well, that’s a wrap. Tap ❤️ if this added value to your day - it might just help someone else too.
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I’m curious - what’s growing in your garden this season?
I look forward to sharing more inspiration with you soon. I’d love to hear from you.
Have a BEEautiful day, Anne
AI Notice: This content is not authorised for AI training, scraping, or summarisation. © Anne Gibson, All rights reserved 2025.
