Broccoli Companion Planting Plan

We previously completed our Corn Companion Planting Plan and our Tomato Companion Planting Plan.  That accounts for 4 of our 7 soil beds.  Now we need to complete our Planting Plan for our broccoli.  As always, we'll reference the Purdue University Agricultural Extension Service's Indiana Vegetable Planting Calendar for determining our dates.  Given that broccoli needs some room to grow, recommended spacing being 7", there isn't a whole lot of crops we can plant with the broccoli for an intensive growing plot.  The allies for broccoli are beet, celery, chard, cucumber, lettuce, onion, potato and spinach.  We don't eat beets so per our Golden Rules, we won't be planting those.  The kids absolutely love celery sticks, so we'll be planting those with the broccoli.  We have a soil bed dedicated to lettuce, so we won't plant any here.  We already have onions growing with the tomatoes and you can only use so much onion so we won't be planting more here.  Potato is the same as lettuce, having it's own dedicated soil bed and spinach, while not having a dedicated soil bed, is grown plenty with the tomatoes.  So it looks like it will be broccoli and celery in this soil bed.  That led to the following Planting Plan for our broccoli squares: 

The dark upside down pentagons represent broccoli while the light green pentagons represent celery.  Each little square in the background grid represents 1/2".  Leveraging the staggered approach, we are able to maintain proper distance between the broccoli while the celery fills in the gaps.  Using this plan we should get the following yield from our garden:

Broccoli, 66 days to maturity, row planted at 7" intervals, yield 100 lbs / 100' row.  At 7" intervals, there would be about 2 plants per feet of row.  Since we are using intensive gardening techniques and in this case staggered planting, we actually have 3 plants.  Because broccoli doesn't like to grow in the heat, and given it's 66 DTM, we'll plan on a spring and fall crop.  Our chosen variety is also reputed to produce side shoots once you harvest the main head so we'll keep the plants in the ground harvesting any side shoots until it's time to plant the fall crops.  Thus:

2 crops X 1.5 rows per square ft X 1 lbs/ft X 48 square feet = 144 lbs of broccoli.

Celery, 80 days to maturity, row planted at 8" intervals, yield 1 lbs (8 stalks at 2 ounces each).  Thus:

2 crops X 3 plants per square ft X 1 lbs each X 48 square feet = 288 lbs of celery.

Seeds required for the bed:
Broccoli - 48 X 3 X 2 = 288 @ 100 seeds/pack = 3 packs X $3.95 = $11.85
Celery - 48 X 3 X 2 = 288 @ 250 seeds/pack = 2 packs X $3.95 = $7.90

Now we need to determine the planting dates for these.  The earliest we can plant our broccoli is April 1st.  This is some two weeks before the last spring frost, but broccoli is super hardy so it's OK to plan at this time.  Given the the 66 DTM we'll have our first harvest on June 6th.  If we restart planting again on July 1st, we'll have our last harvest on September 16th.  I'm thinking with season extension we may be able to have a later harvest, but we'll need to do some experimentation on that.  For now, we'll keep to this schedule.

The celery has an earliest sowing date of April 15th.  Given a 80 DTM, that will give us a first harvest on July 4th.  Assuming an immediate reseed, our last harvest will be on October 3rd.

Both broccoli and celery are good for staring seedlings indoors.  If you have season extension equipment in place that can help protect the seedlings from frost after you plant them out, then the growing can be started indoors some 8-12 weeks earlier.  With effective season extension on the back end of the 180 day growing season, it should be possible to squeeze a third crop of celery into a season.  We'll experiment with that next year, but for this year, I think 288 lbs of celery is probably going to be enough.