Growing Cutting Celery: A Complete Profile
By Growing Home Greens Team · August 10, 2026
Cutting celery is the same species as the celery sold blanched and bundled at the grocery store, but it’s an entirely different plant to grow and use: thin, hollow stems and leaves with a much more concentrated celery flavor, treated more like a fresh herb thrown into soups and stocks than a vegetable eaten on its own.
Sowing it
Direct-sow after your last frost, or start transplants indoors. Seed needs some light to germinate, so sow shallowly rather than burying it. Germination takes 7 to 14 days. Space plants 6 inches apart in rows 18 inches apart; mature plants reach about 18 inches tall.
It needs fertile, consistently moist soil and does well in full sun to partial shade, more forgiving of a little shade than most vegetables.
Cut it back, don’t pull it
Once plants are established and before they flower, cut them back to about three-quarters of their height rather than harvesting the whole plant, which lets them regrow for another cutting. This cut-and-come-again habit is the main practical difference from growing regular stalk celery, which is typically harvested once.
A flavor boost, not a stalk substitute
Because the stems are thin and intensely flavored rather than thick and mild, cutting celery works best chopped into soups, stocks, and stir-fries rather than eaten raw the way a stalk of grocery-store celery would be. A little goes further than the equivalent amount of regular celery.
Cutting celery has no recorded companions or antagonists in our data. See the full companion guide for cutting celery for how it’s tracked. At 4 plants per square foot, it fits the Garden Designer’s grid more like a dense herb than the wider spacing regular celery needs.
Source: Cutting Celery: Key Growing Information, Johnny’s Selected Seeds.
Companion planting guide for Cutting Celery (Leaf Celery) · Find your planting dates
Typically viable in USDA zones 2-10. Not sure your zone? Look it up by ZIP code.
Method: Either: Start indoors for an earlier harvest, or direct-sow outside for less fuss. Cutting Celery (Leaf Celery) tolerates either.
See exact start-indoors, direct-sow, and harvest dates for your zone →
How many Cutting Celery (Leaf Celery) plants fit per square foot?
Spacing: 4 per square foot (square-foot-gardening spacing). Mature height: 1.5 ft.
Varieties worth considering
- Straight-species cutting celery (Apium graveolens): Johnny's Selected Seeds sells it as a leaf type of the same species as regular celery, bred for hollow, intensely flavored stems and leaves rather than the thick, blanched stalks a grocery-store bunch is bred for. Used more like a fresh herb than a vegetable. (source)
Cited from the source shown next to each variety. We haven't grown these ourselves yet, so treat this as a research-backed starting point, not a personal endorsement.
Where to buy cutting celery seeds
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See it growing
Search YouTube for "growing cutting celery (leaf celery)" videos → (a live search, not a hand-picked video; results vary and aren't vetted by us)
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Growing Cutting Celery (Leaf Celery): The same species as stalk celery, bred for thin, intensely flavored stems and leaves instead of thick blanched stalks, closer in use to a fresh herb.
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