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 well-established companion pairings, and nothing it needs to be kept away from. 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.
Mature height: 1.5 ft
Method: Either: Start indoors for an earlier harvest, or direct-sow outside for less fuss. Either works.
When to plant cutting celery (leaf celery), by zone
Every zone cutting celery (leaf celery) grows in. Pick your zone in the header and it will be highlighted here. Each zone links to its full page.
| Zone | Start indoors | Sow or plant out | Harvest |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2a & 2b | Mar 25–Apr 1 | May 20–May 27 | Jul 24–Jul 31 |
| 3a & 3b | Apr 4–Apr 11 | May 30–Jun 6 | Aug 3–Aug 10 |
| 4a & 4b | Mar 20–Mar 27 | May 15–May 22 | Jul 19–Jul 26 |
| 5a & 5b | Mar 15–Mar 22 | May 10–May 17 | Jul 14–Jul 21 |
| 6a & 6b | Feb 28–Mar 7 | Apr 25–May 2 | Jun 29–Jul 6 |
| 7a & 7b | Feb 13–Feb 20 | Apr 10–Apr 17 | Jun 14–Jun 21 |
| 8a & 8b | Jan 28–Feb 4 | Mar 25–Apr 1 | May 29–Jun 5 |
| 9a & 9b | Dec 21–Dec 28 | Feb 15–Feb 22 | Apr 21–Apr 28 |
| 10a & 10b | Dec 5–Dec 12 | Jan 30–Feb 6 | Apr 5–Apr 12 |
Harvest dates are about 65 days after the sow or plant-out date, not after starting seeds indoors.
Zone 2 sows before zone 3 here, which looks wrong and is not. USDA zones rank winter cold, not season length, and zone 2 is mostly interior Alaska, where hard winters come with warm summers. More on what a zone measures.
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)
Why each variety is listed comes from the source shown next to it. We haven't grown these ourselves yet, so treat this as a research-backed starting point, not a personal endorsement. The buy links are separate from those sources: they go to seed suppliers that sell that exact variety, and we may earn a commission on some of them.
Where to buy cutting celery seeds
None of the seed suppliers we list carries cutting celery seeds right now. A local garden center or a specialty seed house is the place to look.
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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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