Growing a Celery Plant
Despite its relative simplicity as a vegetable, growing celery can be surprisingly difficult. Celery is at its best in areas where the growing season is long and the weather is moist and cool. Most varieties of celery cannot get by in frost conditions. Still, despite its pickiness, garden grown celery is well worth the effort you put in. In what follows, you'll find out more about growing celery on your own.
Begin by picking out a spot in your garden with at least six hours of sun exposure per day. You want rich and moist soil that's also slightly acidic, between 6.0 and 6.5 pH ideally. You can test this with an inexpensive soil kit, available at any reputable nursery or garden center. Boost the potassium in the area you choose with a sprinkling of wood ashes. Bring back some healthy specimens from your garden center or start indoors from seed about 10 weeks prior to the last frost. If you go the former route, harden off your seedlings and then transplant them once the temperature reaches about 55 F outdoors. If you bring them out when it is cooler, your celery may go to seed prematurely and fail. When ready to plant, put them in the ground slightly deeper than they were in their containers, and give each about six inches of space. Water deeply upon planting and then add mulch in order to keep moisture in and weeds out. You want to constantly keep the soil damp and feed the celery a manure tea monthly. Once the celery appears big enough to eat, you're ready to harvest; you can either pull the entire plant or cut off single stems.
