There are so many recipes that start with an onion and some stalks of celery, and maybe a carrot or two. I was frustrated by the fact that I usually had a homegrown onion around, and maybe even a homegrown carrot, but I always had to buy the celery. So I started trying to grow celery, even though I knew it would be a challenge. Other people had done it in my area, so I thought maybe it would be possible for me too.
Well, it’s not impossible to grow the kind of celery that makes thick, crunchy stalks. But your homegrown celery probably won’t have the big, thick, watery stalks that celery from California has. That’s because you probably don’t want to irrigate it every single day!
Let’s call that kind of celery “vegetable celery.” Seed companies sell several different varieties. I have tried ‘Tango,’ ‘Ventura,’ and a pink Chinese celery. ‘Tango’ got some sort of fungal disease that caused most of the leaves to turn yellow. ‘Ventura’ had less of this problem, but the stalks never got big and thick like grocery store celery. The pink celery was pretty, but the stalks were very thin and stringy.
Enter “leaf celery,” or cutting celery. You can find this variety under “herbs” in the Johnny’s Selected Seeds catalog. I grew it years ago, but sort of forgot about it for a decade or two. Now I am growing it again and giving away the young plants for people to try, because it’s so much easier than celery and yet it packs a celery flavor punch. It’s also extremely hardy and can thrive under row cover through the winter before coming back strong in spring. People have been surprised by how useful this unassuming little plant is.
You can see that the stalks are not thick. It looks more like parsley than like celery really, but the leaves and stalks taste like celery. To be honest, though, the “regular” vegetable kinds of celery that I grew also didn’t get that thick in the stalk: they made more leaves than stalk. So why not just grow the kind for leaves?
Celery has to be started early, in late January or early February. I start them under lights, like onions and leeks. The seed is tiny, and it should not be covered with a lot of soil, just barely covered. I use a pencil tip to move the seeds to the cell plugs; then I just lightly water them in.
Books and seed catalogs caution you not to expose celery seedlings to cold too early, or they will bolt to seed. I have found that in this regard also, leaf celery is easier: it doesn’t seem to ever bolt until it’s supposed to, the spring after it has spent a whole year in the garden and over-wintered. So you can set them outside in their plug trays on nice days in late winter without worrying about them too much.
Celery prefers a mild, rainy climate in summer, like that of Northern Europe, but the plants survive our hot, sometimes dry summers here in TN. I plant them at the end of a bed so that I can give them a little extra water from the hose every now and then, and so that the biennial plants can stay in one place for almost two years. That way I can collect the huge amount of seeds that the plants make in their second summer. The plant sends up one or several tall stalks, with umbelliferous flowers attractive to beneficial insects such as hover flies and parasitic wasps. In fact, this is a good plant to grow for beneficials even if you are not that interested in the leaves as flavoring for cooking. In summer, when the plant is blooming, you will see a lot of tiny insects buzzing around its flowers.
Later, tiny seeds form on the tips of the flowers, and they are easy to collect and save.
Leaf celery can be harvested almost year round. I photographed the plant pictured above in January. It had Agribon row cover over it, but hoops are not necessary. The Agribon is just lying on top of the plants, a very low-hassle way to use row cover. On nice days I pull the row cover off.
But despite its year-round availability as a fresh seasoning, I do dry some of it inside. I just cut it and put it on a seedling heat mat, and it dries out in a few days. Then I might put it in a dehydrator to finish the job, on low heat. That way it stays green.
I may try some “real” celery again in the future, but for now I’m pretty happy with this easy celery.
Many moons ago, I read that eating celery uses up more calories than the celery provides. Clearly this is the hefty supermarket kind, not the delicate, slender kind. If one ate a lot of celery, it could be a [very] modest weight-loss plan.