I always grow celery, since the price at the market seldom comes down, and it's a crop one doesn't see often in our farmer's markets. I do use the self-blanching Utah something or other, and no.......I do not blanch it. You don't need to plant as much as you'd think, because unlike the way it is harvested for sales in stores, you do not need to cut the plant off for home use. It will grow perpetually all season in your garden, if you just harvest from the outer stalks as you need it and leave the heart/crown intact. The very outer stalks are the toughest/woodiest and strongest tasting. I go down through my rows, peel the nastiest outside stalks back a little and take a sharp knife and remove a few from each plant of the middle stalks. I leave the outside stalk remaining and leave a good deal of the inner most stalks. What happens, is that the stalks toward the inside are naturally blanched, and more tender. They are great for cooking like in soups and meatloaf. For a family of two I normally stick in eight to ten plants and end up using only a small portion of the total production. I dug up eight plants this year and moved them into my heated greenhouse in one gallon nursery pots and shall have it all winter.

We have grown celery root for 3 years now  in different locations each time. One garden is very exposed, very rocky soil . . . lots of sun. I donÂt know what the problem was but the plants did not do well. One year it was in very good soil and partial shade  the plants grew nicely. This season it has lots of sun and thereÂs been plenty of sun to go around . . . high temperatures, also. What IÂve noticed is that the plants closest to some bushes where they have maybe an extra hour or 2 before the sun reaches them in the morning are the largest. None of the plants have grown much to date and IÂm thinking that they have just been suppressed because of the heat. Hope that is the case as the weather is cooling now and IÂd like to see a little more NORMAL development. We start them in a heated greenhouse  72 to a tray about the 1st of March. As I say, we had one very good year in good soil with quite a lot of shade. And, taste  delicious! Steve

The edible part of celeriac is its delicious, large, white-fleshed root. The copper-colored parts of the inside of celeriac roots are not disease, but are how celeriac looks. Unless bitter, the green tops could probably be used as an aromatic veg. when making stock, but it is the root that's the reason to grow celeriac. A well-grown celeriac root is about 6 inches across. The Fedco variety linked-to above is not a celeriac, but green stalk celery. Fedco has "Brilliant" celeriac, but their description is for the "diamond" variety! Gourmet seeds has a few; Grow Italian.com has a variety that grows to 3-4 inches (in 100 days!). U must be kidding me. My first choice for seeds is usually Sand Hill Preservation, but their variety, Monstorpolgi, lacks meaningful description (but you could e-mail them for information). Victory Seeds has Giant Prague for $1.55. Hopefully someone with experience in growing celeriac roots will stop by and drop you a line or two about their know-how and favorite varieties. 100 days to maturity is an investment, so the variety grown better yield sizable roots, at leat 6 inches dia., otherwise there's little eatable root left after it's knobby skin is peeled (forget about smooth-skinned celeriacs; those exist only in the wishful-thinking catalog descriptions). Celeriac is especially valuable diced and added to soups, both in the making of the stock (as an aromatic veg.), and added to the soup together with carrots, and leeks. Ahh, leeks. That's another top-notch veg. that you might consider growing. The coarse leaves of leek (top, dark green, & tough) are for making stock, then discarded. The tender white and green parts are sliced and added to the soup that's eaten. Or slice leeks in half length-wise and poach with chicken or beef and serve as a side veg. Celeriac, carrots, onions, and leeks are indispensible vegs when making poached chicken (and chicken soup), and boiled beef (and beef soup). Ahh, I forgot horseradish! Grated, horseradish makes cold meats for sandwiches stand out. It's delicious when grated and added to sauce (hot or cold) & draped over hot or cold meats, especially chicken and beef. For example, poached chicken meat in horsesradish (bhamel (milk-based) or velouté (stock-based)) sauce is an outstanding meal. Economical too. And not difficult to make! Grated horseradish added to a little mayo is a great sauce on cold roast-beef sandwiches, or w/o the mayo, just grated on the meat. Best of luck with your garden projects, and may the chucks and rabbits in your neck of the woods look elsewhere for their meals..... Victory Seeds Gourmet Seeds Fedco's "Brilliant" Sand Hill Preservation's "Monstorpolgi" ppod

Celeriac will tend to bolt in hot weather if it was exposed to temperatures 55 degrees for about a week to ten days, so our wide range of winter temperatures will be hard on it. I only use celeriac occasionally in cooking, so don't bother trying to grow it here since I don't use it very often. I grew it in winter in zone 8 Texas one year and it was more trouble than it was worth because it doesn't like really hot or really cold temperatures so you spend a lot of time trying to protect it from very cold winter weather and also from very hot winter weather. I haven't tried to grow it in zone 7. As a biennial, once celeriac is exposed to cool temperatures around or below 55 degrees for a few days, it "thinks" its' first season is over because it perceives those cold temperatures as winter/the dormant season. Then, when the weather warms up, it perceives the warmer weather as its second year, and does what biennials do in their second year---it goes to seed. If this sounds like a familiar problem, it is....we have this trouble with all sorts of cool-season biennials in our climate where the cool-season can be shockingly short most springs. (Last year's prolonged rainy spring weather might have been perfect for celeriac, but we're unlikely to have that same sort of long, cool, rainy spring in 2016 because our weather generally doesn't repeat like that....I almost always get a searingly hot dry year after a pleasant wet year.) The performance of many cool-season crops here is very similar to celeriac in the way that they can bolt and go to seed based merely on the wide range of temperature fluctuations we see here in winter and spring, and I only have so much space I'm willing to devote to cool-season stuff that may or may not produce a good yield. I give a lot more space to warm-season crops that produce well without much worry about the temperatures, though potatoes always get a lot of space because they always produce.....as does asparagus. I do pamper rhubarb a little bit, but not too much because I run out of patience with its' heat problems too. If I was going to try to grow it here, I'd sow the seed indoors 8-12 weeks before I was expecting my air temperatures to start staying above 55 degrees consistently so I'd have decent-sized transplants to put in the ground once the air temperatures stabilize. Then I'd plant it in soil very heavily amended with organic matter and I'd plant it where it was in dappled shade or in early morning sun for a couple of hours but with shade the rest of the day. Keep in mind it loves, loves, loves water and absolutely needs moist soil at all times. I feel like you almost could grow it in a swamp, or on the edge of a swamp. It will not tolerate dry soil or hot soil, so mulching the soil heavily to keep the ground moist and cool will help. It takes a long time to mature so you probably wouldn't be able to harvest it until fall if you can keep it alive through the summer heat. Mature celeriac in the fall will tolerate some freezing temperatures (and they will sweeten up its flavor slightly), but not a hard freeze. We really do not have the weather it needs here, and I am pretty picky about not wasting my time on crops that need an extraordinary amount of weather-related pampering. Or, at least, I carefully choose what gets pampering, and about the only thing in my garden that is pampered and well-protected is tomatoes (no surprise there, huh?) and maybe peppers if the cold nights just hang on forever. I put celeriac in a big pot of soup recently and, while my family ate and enjoyed the soup, they didn't care much for the celeriac. I ate my celeriac, but I'm pretty sure the other two members of this household did not.