celery ...can you grow it

[areia]

Ive been lucky with my celery growing ( so far ) though this is the first time im growing them on my allotment,

Got chatting to a fellow plotter, whos patch is amazing and quite alot of people praise his work he and his missus does,

He said to me if you can grow celery ya doing better than me he's never been able to grow it nor anyone else who has tried, I casualy say welllllll so far ive not had a problem ever growing it, ( slight fib as it took trial and error getting them to germinate years ago, ) I'm to pop a ready plant over to jim to test under the promise ive not cheated a bought one ( cheek )

I gave the plants a good talking too yesterday so hopfully they will finish growing nicely .................

So how many of you grow celery or have tried, have you been succsessfull or given up

[Capsid]

I've tried and made some nice celery soup with them, but they were very stringy and no good for salads. Not bothered since.

[taff]

I grow it, for soup, stews, sauces, etc, so I don't care about blanching it.
This year has been really successful [ I wonder why? ] but also i attribute it to having dug up where I planted them, and thrown a load of kitchen waste underneath them - unrotted. Gives them more food and keeps the soil moister than it would be. All of them look really good, hardly any of them have insect bites [or at least they didn't the last time I looked] and they have less leaf miner than usual.
In the past, if I haven't watered enough they have been chomped a bity more, and a lot less lush looking.
This year has been great for celery

[Fungus]

I am growing celery for the first time and its doing very well! However, it does have quite a few smaller stalks coming out at the side - not sure if I am supposed to snap them off or to encourage them to grow? Either way, I have eaten a few and they are not stringy and quite strong flavoured but very tasty!

[Ananke]

I'm growing a seff blanching variety and it seems to be doing well despite the weeds that are taking over. I grew it once before and it was quite woody but I only use it for stocks, gravys and sauces so it didn't matter too much.

[Florence Fennel]

I tried it in buckets last year, but put too many in one bucket and found it hard to keep up with the watering, so it was leggy and stringy at the same time. Haven't bothered this year, wish I had with all the rain we've been having.

[cazp]

My first attempt at celery has been a success and I'm harvesting individual stalks quite often now as and when needed, they are no more stringy than supermarket celery and taste worlds better.

The variety is lathom Galaxy (self blanching) 4 plants in a square foot. I've since heard that planting them closely blocks light from the stems making them more tender.

Between the 4 plants I have an upturned 1.5 half bottle with bottom cut off held in place with a cane - when there hasnt been torrential rain I have filled this once or twice a day to ensure the soil is always moist - sometimes I pop a bit of feed in too.

[Farmer_Gyles]

i've never had any success with celery .... but i still try ... i have 3 baby plants, all about 3in high ....

[binley100]

I usually grow selfblanching which is fine for cooking with. Salad celery it ain't.... This year I'm trying giant red trench celery . They've had kitchen roll tubes tied round them , been mulched, earthed up , flooded and still some of them have bolted. It's not meant to be ready till October..........