> Next: When to Harvest Vegetables
Harvest Time
In this section, you’ll find methods and techniques used to pick and harvest many commonly-grown species of vegetables, including:
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- Recognizing ripeness in many types of vegetables.
- Harvesting method recommendations by vegetable species.
- Tips and hints on picking fruit, berries, and root and leafy green vegetables
- Telling continuous-harvest vegetables from mature-harvest vegetables.
- Preventing and dealing with too many ripening vegetables due to overproduction.
Timing Picking and Harvesting
Recognizing ripeness assures your fruit, berries and leafy greens will have peak texture, nutrition, and flavor when you pick them in your home vegetable garden.
Judging peak ripeness is a skill honed over time. Still, there are some tips for recognizing ripeness and picking when vegetables reach their optimum flavor:
Greens. Leafy green vegetables such as bok choy, cabbage, endive, horseradish greens, lettuce, mustard greens, sorrel, spinach, and Swiss chard are at their tender best when the plants are young.
Thinning not only provides delicately flavored early salad ingredients, it alleviates overcrowding and competition for nutrients and water.
Use the outside leaves, allowing the central growth bud to form new leaves until it begins to bolt, or form a seed head. Water the evening before harvest.
Root Vegetables. Root vegetables such as carrot, parsnip, radish, rutabaga, and turnip are good candidates for long-season picking.
When young, their flavor is mild and their texture is tender. By maturity, they develop the rich flavors and sturdy flesh desired for stews and soups.
Mulch over the ripe root crops when the first frosts start, and you’ll be able to have fresh vegetables until hard freezes begin; in milder climates, your garden will yield root vegetables all winter long.
Vine Vegetables. Vine vegetables such as beans, cucumber, gourds, peas, pumpkin, and squash should be picked when they reach full size and color, or when legume pods first fill with plump peas and beans.
Hand pick small fruit and pods, but use a sharp pair of bypass pruning shears to cut the sturdy stems of larger fruit. An exception should be made for berry vines, which require daily picking as their fruit achieves full color.
Tomatoes. Tomatoes come in two varieties, determinate and indeterminate. Cultivars grown commercially and those used for cooking or paste usually are determinate—all their fruit forms and ripens at once—while home and heritage cultivars set a stream of new tomatoes until the vine is killed by frost.
In either case, pick tomatoes when their flesh is fully colored and their skin becomes tender; test it with your thumbnail to see if it will mark slightly with light pressure, a sure sign of ripeness.
Fruiting Vegetables. Stalk and bush vegetables such as broccoli, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, corn, eggplants, and peppers will reach ripeness in successive groups.
Carefully peel back the husk of the fullest ear of corn 1–2 in. (25–50 mm) after its silk turns brown. If kernels near the tip are swelling, the corn is at its peak flavor. Pick it, submerging it immediately in ice water, and cook it right away; each hour after harvest some of its sugar turns to woody-tasting starch.
Pick eggplants and peppers using the same coloration and skin-bruising tests as you would for tomatoes.
Cruciferous (Cole) Vegetables. Cole vegetables such as broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower should be picked just as their flowers begins to swell but before they open.
Bulb Vegetables. Aromatic bulb vegetables such as garlic, onion, and shallot will begin to send up pompon-shaped flower heads when they near maturity. Forestall this tendency by lodging their stems [see Lodging and Blanching].
Lodging ensures that the remaining growth will take place in the swelling bulb. When the foliage begins to yellow, it’s time to pull your bulb vegetables and put them in a warm, sheltered, airy spot to cure and dry.
Overproduction
While eating fresh or canning, freezing, and drying to quickly preserve most of the vegetables you grow are efficient and effective ways of dealing with your garden’s yield, overproduction sometimes becomes a problem. Vegetable plantings simply may overwhelm and produce too much produce to reasonably consume, process, preserve, or store.
Plan ahead to avoid and control having too many vegetables or other produce. Plant the right number of each vegetable for your family’s needs to control the yield. Prompt and early harvesting of young, high-quality produce also helps.
Another solution many consider is planting non-competing but beautiful companion plantings of other vegetables and flowers along with high-yield, mature-harvest vegetables.
Removal and replanting with another short-maturity crop—such as salad greens or radishes—also help solve overproduction problems.
Two Types of Harvests
Most vegetables fall into one of two categories for harvesting:
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- Continuous-Harvest Vegetables
- Mature-Harvest Vegetables
Continuous-Harvest Vegetables
Nearly all leaf vegetables are continuous-harvest species that produce a series of harvestable pickings as they mature. Many other vegetable species also produce multiple times before their production slows and stops.
They include:
Artichoke, asparagus, beans (green and snap), Brussels sprout, chard, chive, corn, cucumber, eggplant, endive, horseradish, leaf lettuce, mustard, onion, pea (snap, sugar, and snow), pepper, rhubarb, sorrel, spinach, summer squash, tomatillo, and indeterminate tomato.
Mature-Harvest Vegetables
The mature-harvest vegetables bloom, set fruit or develop and ripen once per growing cycle.
They are:
Beans (drying), broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, garlic, kohlrabi, head lettuce, melon, onion, pea (drying), peanut, potato, pumpkin, shallot, sweet potato, determinate tomato, and winter squash.
Picking Techniques
Each vegetable has its own picking, cutting, snapping, or other picking method.
Set two goals as you harvest:
First, protect the producing plant so that it is not harmed during harvest.
Second, protect the harvested greens, fruit, shoots, ears, pods, berries, or roots so they will retain their appeal, taste, and appearance when you prepare them for meals or for preserving or freezing.
The technique used to separate a ripe ear of sweet corn from its stalk while allowing younger ears to mature above it is shown below.