celery

After reading a colorful description of beautiful, crisp, freshly picked celery in a vintage English novel, I picked up a seed pack of Tall Utah improved celery seeds when I was in town. Long ago I tried to grow celery without much sucess but I'd like to try it again, just for the fun of it. Anyone on the east coast have any experience or advice on growing it? The package states 125 days to maturity, so I would need to start the seeds asap. Thanks.

Celery is tough. One it is a marsh plant, so the soil can never be allowed to dry out, which means constant watering. It also is a heavy feeder so a well amended soil with lots of nutirnts is essential. Does not like heat very much either, which makes it difficult in the south. Maybe at your higher elevation it will do well. At least today we eat green celery. In the old days we planted it in a trench and continually pulled dirt up around it as it grew to blanch the stalks. More work than it was worth. http://www.rootsweb.com/~mikalama/celery.htm#Growing_Celery_

Thanks Dill, it sounds a lot harder than I had hoped. Well, I may try to set out half a dozen in partial shade and see what happens. I am way too susceptible to reading about the glories of all vegetable growing until the hard work, the heat and weeds hit. I made a vow to myself last summer I would stop growing the veg I don't really like to eat and concentrate on what I actually use at the table. The problem is I just like growing it all, just wish I had someone else to deal with it once it gets ripe.

I've had fair success with celery dinant. It grows an almost solid stalk. It tolerates slightly drier conditions than standard celery. The only place I've ever found seeds is Nichols in Oregon.

I realize my growing conditions are very different from those in San Antonio and in GA. I live at high altitude ( 7,300 ft.) and as a result my nights are very cool, though days in summer can be in the 90's. I know celery demands a lot of water, but it gets no more than my lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, etc. I grow it in a raised bed which gets an automatic spray once each day. It is certainly not a bog where it grows.
I grow the Utah 52-70 or something similar for years, but have grown other varieties as well. They all do well, but I don't expect an outcome as at the supermarket. The plants don't grow into cylinders, on the whole, because I don't put any restraints on them. I just go out and cut a stalk whenever it is called for in my recipe. It is lovely not to have an entire plant rotting in my refrigerator. I just go cut a stalk from the garden. At the end of the year, I make something like caponata which takes a lot of celery, then start over the next year. A few plants bolt, but not many.
I plant very early -- March indoors, April outside. In GA one would probably plant earlier.
I don't know if celery would grow in GA or even worse in San Antonio, but I always plant it in northern New Mexico.

What about celaric (sp?) = celery root. Anyone tried that?

I haven't tried growing that here yet, but I certainly buy a lot of it at our farmer's market. I love celeriac!
We get it with the greens still attached, so I use those like stalk celery to season my soups.

Celery will keep much longer in the crisper of your fridge if you wrap it in aluminum foil. Don't know why that works, but it does.

Thanks for all the great ideas. I'm going to start a few seeds and see what happens.

We grew celery this past summer. Started in the greenhouse, set the plants out May 8. We planted in our lower ground, which is real black loam & rich. Set out more on June 6.
Started harvesting when 12 to 15 inches tall. Mind you the stalks were small, but made up for it in flavor. By the end of summer only a few tough looking ones were left.
Sold most at the Farmers Market. It took a while for it to catch on, but when it did they sold fast. Asian people really liked them, but then they use lots of these kinds of things. Most people used the celery for flavoring soups , stews & stir-fries. It is a little though for using as celery sticks. By the end of summer the bunches were about 18 to 20 inches tall, but they kept growing new stalks around the base, so some bunches were huge.
I think we had around 300 plants, & like I said earlier, sold most.
We are going to plant again this year.
The summer was dry here & we did not water them.
Bernie

I've grown the Utah something celery here in northeastern Oregon. The plants were started in pots under lights about 6 weeks early and set out into a garden row when they were about an inch high, (slow growers at that point but maybe not enough fertilizer or room for their roots) since they grew very well once they were in the garden. They got watered the same as everything else and half a dozen plants gave us more celery than we could use for cooking. In the fall I dried all the tops for use in the winter. Homegrown celery has way more flavor than the supermarket kind, probably because it was allowed to grow naturally. Celery is on my list again this year.

I wintersowed celery just for kicks, got fantastic germination, transplanted, and had it all summer and through late fall. I believe the variety was Giant Pascal... got it from Sand Hill Preservation Center. I have a heavy (though amended) clay soil and didn't give it any special treatment.

Thanks MaryE. Good to know you had such good results. Hi Zeppy! Thanks for the info. I also have heavy clay amended soil, so I am going to give it a try. I hope we have plenty of rain this summer and not so much heat. Keep dreaming!