Celery Worth the Trouble to Grow
By Barbara Damrosch
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, March 18, 2004; Page H08

Celery is a crop that everybody eats and hardly anybody grows. Some people love its crisp, mild taste, but for many, celery is simply there. It's something you use to transport cream cheese or onion dip to the mouth, a sort of edible cutlery.

 I can't imagine cooking without it. Turkey stuffing without celery? Or chicken salad, potato salad, egg salad? There must always be a bunch in the fridge to brown with onions and carrots as the base for a stock or a soup.

If you have ever raised celery and done it well, you know that the homegrown stalk is better than what comes in the bag. For one thing, it always has leaves, which are good for the stockpot and delicious fresh in a salad or ham sandwich. Veteran celery growers also know that this is not a crop you plant casually -- perhaps the real reason it is not a present garden staple. It is fussy about moisture, temperature and soil, and you can't turn your back on its needs. Consider yourself an accomplished gardener if you can produce magnificent celery. Historically, celery is a marsh plant from the Mediterranean, noted by Homer. The original form, consumed for its strongly flavored leaves or used medicinally, was called "smallage" by the English, and now sprouts up wild in damp places all over the world. 

The stalk celery we eat now was developed in England and was first cultivated as a serious crop in America by Dutch farmers who settled around Kalamazoo, Mich. Accustomed to working wet soils, and shod with stout wooden shoes, they grew celery in the region's rich, mucky fields. Before long the succulent novelty was being peddled to train passengers who paused at the Kalamazoo station. From there it spread by rail as a snack food.

Those marshy beginnings are a clue to good celery culture. Although it won't grow in standing water, the soil must be kept continuously moist for germination, growth and good flavor. It's also a hungry crop. Think wheelbarrow loads of well-rotted manure, well-moistened peat, well humified mature compost, the more the better. If your soil is deficient in calcium, celery may develop an ugly disease called black heart. Digging in a bit of crabshell meal (a Maryland byproduct) or just simple garden lime should do the trick.

The tiny seeds, which are slow to germinate, are usually started indoors, in flats of well-moistened soil mix about 10 weeks before danger of frost has passed. It is important not to transplant them outdoors too soon. Celery is a biennial that sets seed its second year. If you bring it outside while temperatures are still below 50 degrees, it will think its first winter has arrived, then send up a tough flower stalk at the center when the weather starts to warm.

I suggest planting the heads in a double row, set a foot apart each way. Do it on a cloudy day to avoid heat stress. After that, the trick is to never let the celery stop growing. Pay close attention to watering, and dose with manure tea or liquid fish fertilizer if growth is slow or the foliage is pale. You can harvest the outer stalks as you need them for the kitchen, or wait and cut the mature bunches before the stalks turn pithy.

There is still time to start a crop if you can find seedlings for sale at a nursery. Otherwise wait till mid-June to sow your flats, then set out seedlings in August for a fall crop. Celery likes the cooling days of fall and will even stand light frosts. It'll store a month or two in a cold cellar if you leave the roots on and cover it to keep it from drying out. Or use a spare fridge.

In the old days, celery was laboriously blanched in the field to make it tender. Then pale "self-blanching" varieties were developed. But they were less tasty and nutritious, and modern green varieties like Ventura, which need no blanching, make more sense. Despite these advances, it's still a Cinderella crop. You will rarely find celery in gourmet seed catalogues, although you might find something called "cutting celery," which is not far removed from the old smallage and essentially a leaf crop. Once known as "soup celery," it is easy to grow.

I am sometimes amazed at how we take our staple foods for granted, how we stroll by them in the market, or toss them into the cart with so little awareness of what kind of trail led them to us. Next time you reach for a celery stick, don't dwell on the fact that it's not a doughnut or a cookie. Imagine it's 1890 and you're on a train pulling into Kalamazoo. Someone hands you a green stalk. It's so crunchy and full of moisture, so alive, so new.