Celery
A cool-season crop of Almería's Levante, keeping company with lettuce and cabbages. It arrives in crunchy, leafy bunches — vegetable freshness for stocks, stews and salads.
Celery belongs to the leaf crops of Almería's Levante: recent plant-health notices from the Junta cite it alongside lettuce, spinach and the brassicas, and provincial statistics record its production, within the open-air range that rounds out the province's calendar. This page leaves it there — without dredging up old export rankings that are hard to compare today.
Apium graveolens is an apiaceous plant, from the carrot and fennel family. To get tender, crunchy ribs it asks for steady water and a harvest before the fibres toughen; in the Almerian climate, commercial cycles favour the cool months, when the heat lets up — it is a temperate-climate plant that fears the frosts of the interior and seeks the mildness of the coastal strip. The bunches are cut at the crown, trimmed and quickly protected from drying out to keep their snap and colour.
In the kitchen it works in the background: in the sofrito of stews, in fish stocks and, raw, in salads that welcome its bitter edge.
Season
Deep green on the Levante plains
Celery can be seen from afar: patches of deep, even green across the Levante plains in the middle of winter, when the countryside around them dozes in shades of brown. Up close, upright clumps of tightly packed stalks, planted in lines that seek the mild air of the coastal strip.
Growing without a check until cutting day
Planted once the heat lets up, celery wants to grow without interruption: any setback — thirst, a cold snap — is paid for in tough stalks. So its commercial cycle follows the mild months of the coastal strip, the plants watched closely until cutting day, when the bunch is tender and whole.
