Harvest my Garden Plants for the best possible Yields

A few summers ago I taught a short course on gardening for the University of Vermont. The classes were held at my test gardens. During a discussion about root crops, Willie, one of the students, said, “Dick, I grow real nice carrots, but I don’t like them too much. I can hardly eat them; they seem so woody.”

“How big do you grow them?” I asked.

Willie smiled, “Oh, they get real good size. I’ve got nice loose soil for them.”

I decided it was time for our morning walk through the gardens. I stopped the class near a wide row of carrots. “Willie, let’s pick some to munch on, okay?” I said.

“Sure,” he replied, “as long as they’re not as woody as mine.”

Together we bent over the row, found some of the darkest green tops, and reached down to pull some carrots. They were not much thicker or longer than my index finger. “They’re so small,” Willie said.

“Don’t knock them ’till you try ‘em,” I told him.

He brushed off a few and started eating. “They’re not woody,” he exclaimed. “They’re sweet and crisp! I never thought carrots this small could be worth much.”

Small is beautiful, I told Willie and the class. To me, the whole point of gardening is to have the longest possible harvest of the best-tasting vegetables. That’s one reason why I plant as many crops as I can in wide rows, and why I start harvesting as soon as there’s something big enough to eat in the row. Why let vegetables grow past their prime eating stage?

Small vegetables taste great; they are tender, and because they are young and growing fast, bugs, diseases, and animal pests have practically no time to bother them.

In my gardening method, early harvesting of small vegetables is important. With wide rows I must start pulling or picking vegetables in the row as soon as I can. By doing so, I thin the row. As plants develop in a wide row they need more growing space, extra food, and more water. Without regular thinning, too many plants would be deprived of these, and the harvest would be disappointing.

When I pull my first beet greens, for example, there are only thumb-sized beets on the bottom. The first cabbages from my wide rows weigh only a pound or two. From the Iceberg lettuce row, I cut heads that haven’t begun to firm up. I pull many onions when they are just pickling size, no fatter than a quarter. I cut spinach when the biggest leaves are only 3 or 4 inches long.

When there’s something big enough to eat, I go after it.

Pick, pick, pick

Plants have a purpose in life—to produce seeds. Before producing seeds, however, they produce their “fruit,” and this is where the gardener steps in. With many vegetables, as long as you can keep a plant from making mature seeds, it will continue growing fruit to try and reproduce itself. This means the more vegetables you pick, the more some plants will produce. And, of course, this means a larger and longer harvest.

To prove it, try this experiment: plant two zucchini (or cucumber) seeds or plants near each other. When the zucchini or cucumbers appear, harvest from only one plant. Pick off every zucchini or cucumber when it gets 4 to 6 inches long. After 6 weeks of harvesting from that one plant, I bet you’ll have harvested 25 or so little zucchini or cucumbers. After 6 weeks, stop harvesting and let the remaining fruit mature. Let the zucchini or cucumbers on the other plant mature also.

After all the fruits on both plants are mature, count them. The untouched plant will have 6 to 10 zucchini or cucumbers on it. The other plant—the one that’s given you 25 already—will also have 6 to 10 on it.

Harvest all ready snap beans to keep plants productive.

You can see how harvesting the vegetable when it’s young lengthens the fruit-producing life of the plant. Not harvesting permits the plant to fulfill its normal life cycle, making and maturing seeds, and then closing down the shop.

Once you start picking beans, broccoli, peas, as well as zucchini and cucumbers, you shouldn’t stop. Even if you can’t eat it all, harvest anyway. It’s the only way to keep the plants sensing they have not finished their life cycles. They’ll keep trying, and producing.

If you have too much produce, sell it, give it away to friends and neighbors, or put it in your compost pile. The important thing is to keep the plant in the productive stage. You’ll be glad you did later in the season when other folks’ crops have petered out.

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