Planting Leeks, How to Grow Leeks, Harvesting Leeks

Easy methods for planting leeks when home vegetable gardening. Learn how to plant, grow, care for, and harvest leeks in your backyard vegetable garden. This delicious vegetable adds the perfect mild onion-like flavor to soups, stews, and stir-frys. It's a dependable winner in every home garden.

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How to Grow Leeks

The leek seedlings set into the garden in April look like nothing more than thin wisps of grass but by June they will grow into robust plants.

Fill in the trench as the plants grow so that by early summer the ground is level and six inches of the leeks' succulent stems are underground blanching to a delicious flavor.

In June, if you do not use the gardening technique of planting in a trench, begin hilling soil around the plants.

Mound the soil right to the base of the leaves to tenderize the lower portion of the stems.

Before each hilling, scatter 5-10-5 fertilizer, about 5 ounces to a 10 foot row.

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Growing leeks requires a long season of 75 to 190 days to mature.

Start the plants indoors in March or two months before the last frost.

Transplant to a cold frame or individual containers as soon as the small plants can be handled easily.

Down in the Trenches

Leek Plant Varieties

For planting leeks early, try the variety Titan.

Recommended main season varieties include Broad London and Giant Musselburgh.

Leeks are a desirable crop for ground storage and all varieties can be kept in the garden if the earth around them is mulched heavily enough to prevent it from freezing.

Harvesting Leeks

After planting leeks in the garden in April, the leek seedlings will not reach their full maturity until late in the fall.

When fully matured, the stems are long and white from growing in the trench.

Although, the produce is at their biggest in the autumn, they are edible throughout their growth.

In fact, the harvest can begin as early as June or July.

Leeks stand up well to frost and can be harvested until the ground freezes hard.

Vegetable Gardening Tips for Leeks

Harvesting that begins in autumn will continue longer and give you more flavor by using your leek bed as a winter storage area and keep digging leeks through the wintertime.

Planting leeks can follow an early crop of peas.

This is a luxury that commercial growers cannot afford when planting leeks.

They are forced into harvesting the entire leek crop in a single operation in order to turn over the acreage to another planting.

Once again, the home gardener wins!

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Planting Leeks to Vegetable Gardening

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