Cutting Celery for Kitchen Gardens
After growing celery of all types in various gardens, I think the best choice for kitchen gardeners is cutting celery (Apium graveolens var. secalinum). Sometimes called seasoning celery, French celery or Chinese celery, cutting celery is a more primitive form of familiar supermarket celery. A great cut-and-come-again vegetable, cutting celery plants that are harvested often send up new stalks all summer.
With crisp stalks and tender leaves packed with flavor, cutting celery is easy to grow from seeds sown in spring. The stalks and leaves are used in salads and stocks, and the leaves keep their flavor when dried. The seeds make a great seasoning for dozens of dishes.
If you can nurse year-old plants through winter (certainly doable in Zone 6), they will send up a huge flush of stems in early summer, followed by lots of flowers and seeds. Like parsley, cutting celery is hardy to about 5°F, especially when provided with an insulating mulch.
As a true biennial, overwintered cutting celery is happy to produce zillions of seeds. Seedlings set out in spring while the weather is still cool may receive sufficient chilling to bloom and set seed their first summer.