>Next: Harvesting Techniques
Harvesting and Preserving
After your garden matures and your vegetables ripen to perfection and peak flavor, it’s time for a rare treat. You’ll pick produce fresh from your garden to share with your family and friends.
Plan for a series of harvests in your vegetable garden all season long by learning more about each of these subjects:
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- Tips, hints, and demonstrations for how to harvest fresh vegetables from a home vegetable garden.
- What harvesting techniques to use for each type of vegetable you grow.
- When to pick vegetables at the peak of their flavor and taste.
- How to process and prepare fresh vegetables for freezing.
- How to store, preserve, dry, or freeze picked vegetables.
- The methods used to pickle or can fresh vegetables in jars, and when to use a pressure cooker./
- How to harvest, store, and save seed for planting the following season.
- How to celebrate autumn with easy harvest projects from your garden
In the pages that follow, you’ll find detailed information, explanations, and demonstrations for each of these important garden harvesting subjects.
Rewards from Your Garden
Picking Vegetables
Harvesting produce at its peak of flavor is a treat reserved for those who grow their own vegetables. Unlike market vegetables, those grown in your garden ripen completely and naturally, fill with sweetness, and develop tender flesh and rich, succulent flavor.
Some vegetables reach a pinnacle of ripeness and a peak of flavor all at once, just as the plant matures; these include eggplant, melon, and squash. Other vegetables offer many opportunities throughout the season for gathering and tasting: amaranth, all of the leaf lettuces, sorrel, and spinach. Then there are root crops such as beets, carrots, and turnips, which can be stored right in the garden even after they mature, under a protective covering of mulch. You can dig them as you need them over a period of months.
Learn more about when vegetables should be harvested to achieve peak taste and how fresh produce should be picked by clicking on these links:
Ripeness and Preserving Options
While most times your goal will be to consume your garden’s fruit immediately after picking, sometimes you will be blessed with an overabundance of vegetables that will warrant freezing, preserving or canning them for later use.
Whether you pick your vegetables to eat raw in salads or as crudités, to cook them as accompaniments to a main course, or for preserving, recognizing the right time to harvest will give you a big payback in terms of taste. Each vegetable has its own telltale signs of ripeness, which you should learn to recognize.
Refer to each vegetable to understand its harvest, storage and preservation recommendations [see Vegetables]. You’ll find tips for ideal means of short- and long-term storage, as well as methods and techniques for preserving each vegetable.
Learn more about storing and preserving your harvest by clicking on these links: