Garden Tedious Harvesting Pick Early and Pick Often part 1

“The best solution to tedious harvesting chores,” says a lazy gardener, “is to have lots of kids! Corral them to shell the peas, cut the beans, husk the corn, and skin the beets.” Family bees can be fun.

But, alas, the kids grow up. Lacking a crew of children, plan a social occasion to mesh with the height of raspberry, pea, or bean season. Bill it as a harvesting party, and have a gay time with picking, shelling, and freezing in the same way that folks had with husking bees in times past. It works best with friends who have no garden.

Get them while they’re little! This time we mean crops, not weeds. It’s not only less work to pick young crops; they plain taste better than tough, overmature produce. Regular picking encourages a plant to produce more, so you’ll have a better harvest. Small, tender vegetables also take less time and energy to process. Keep the joy in gardening — never give growing time for a stringy bean, a seedy cucumber or zucchini, starchy peas or corn, a woody beet, bitter lettuce, or tough spinach.

In early spring, when you crave fresh vegetables, you can fool around with cloches and fight frosts and cold earth to strive for unnaturally early crops, or you can raid the perennial flower garden and the woods for an easy early harvest.

* Cut daylily sprouts when they are about three inches high, steam, drizzle with butter, and serve like asparagus.

* Grab a knife and rush out to your ground cover of violets as soon as young leaves form, but before flowers bloom. Cut a batch to steam and eat, tossed with a bit of butter. They’re a green of incredible delicacy, a cross in flavor between spinach and asparagus. Just be sure to get them while they’re young.

* When the violets bloom, put a few in your salad, for color and Vitamin C.

* Lucky you, if ostrich fern bedecks your yard. Be alert for emerging fiddleheads and snap them off when tightly curled and no more than six inches high. (When they are taller, they are not good to eat, in fact, poisonous once they unfurl. ) Don’t remove more than a third to a half of the shoots from any one plant. Pull each stalk through your fingers to remove the feltlike covering and wash quickly in cold water. Eat raw in salads, steam like asparagus, make fiddlehead soup, or blanch for two minutes and freeze, for a mid-winter treat. (If none grow in youryard, a likely place to find them is a silty flood plain near a riverbed.)

* Leeks in the garden take 120 or more days to mature. For a spring treat without the waiting, enjoy the pungent sharpness of their cousins, the wild leeks, found on an early walk in rich woods. Their foliage begins as a tightly curled cylinder, then unfurls to resemble lily-of-the-valley leaves. Chop and add to salads or use for leek soup.

Here’s a simple way to make sure you’ll harvest your vegetables when you want them. You can figure the harvest date using the days from planting to harvest listed on seed packets. Put all your vegetables on one chart (like the sample below), and you’ll be able to time your produce for such uses as spaghetti sauce, which requires more than one vegetable.

Bush beans all come at once and picking can be a back-breaking chore. Save your back and extend the harvest for a longer time by choosing pole beans instead. Kentucky Wonder or Romano Italian Pole are delectable steamed when young. If you tire of fresh beans or you go on vacation, let the pods mature and use them as shell beans, either immediately or dried for winter meals.

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