We’re talking about organizing and planning again. This time, it’s not so much about space as it is about time. To make the most of your garden, you want to use every inch but also every day of your growing season.
In practice, it means you plant seeds at many points through the season, not just all at once in the spring. Second and third plantings can help you make the most of your time.
For one example, you could plant a patch of radishes in the early spring. They’ll be ready to pull and harvest in a month or so. Without planning ahead, their space would just sit empty now for the rest of the summer. If it’s shady, you could actually keep planting more radishes if you wanted. Otherwise, it’s perfect to plant something that prefers the warmer temperatures. Maybe some beans.
Later in the summer, when your main crops are finished, go back to thinking about your spring plants. They’ll be just as happy in the cooler fall weather as they are in the spring. So if you have a month or so left before winter, revisit some lettuce or maybe even early peas.
Another aspect of successive sowing is deliberately planting certain crops in delayed batches so that you don’t end up with one huge harvest at once. So if you need 3 rows of green beans for your family, do one row, wait a week before planting the second row, then wait another week to put in the last one. As long as you’re not delaying anything past your frost dates, it should be fine. That means you’ll have a more gradual load of beans to deal with later on.