You may think blanching is only something done to vegetables after being harvested, but there’s a trick called blanching that will prevent the celery in your garden from becoming thin and bitter.
The scoop
Blanching is covering portions of a plant and blocking it from the sun, which prevents photosynthesis and chlorophyll production (which gives plants their green color). The same thing happens to lettuce naturally, which is why the outer leaves are always a darker green than the inner leaves.
«You take something like newspaper or cardboard,» he explains in the video as he wraps a celery stalk in a piece of cardboard. «You’re gonna wrap this around your celery nice and tight. And what that’s gonna do is, that’s gonna allow your celery to grow really thick stalks.»
An article from Gardener’s Path gets into the dirty details of blanching, including two alternative ways to cover your stalks. You can use waxed half-gallon milk cartons with the tops and bottoms cut off to slide over the leaves and stalks. And then there’s «mounding,» which is basically burying the stalks with more dirt a few weeks before harvest.
Andre the Farmer suggests blanching your celery for about two months, but Gardener’s Path and other sites suggest two to three weeks, so it’s something you’ll want to test out yourself to see what works for you. And make sure not to cover the leaves at the top, so a part of the plant still gets that beautiful sunlight.
How it’s helping
If the celery stalk is getting a lot of sun, increasing chlorophyll production, it’s going to taste more bitter. Blanching blocks the sun, causing the celery to have a lighter color and, more importantly, a sweeter taste.
Growing celery is a long and challenging task, so ending up with bitter, thin stalks is a bummer. Taking these fairly simple steps to blanch your celery will set you up for success. Plus, with the price of groceries on the rise, eating food from your garden also saves money.