Garden Tedious Harvesting Pick Early and Pick Often part 4

Lazy gardeners, here’s an opportunity to sit in the shade and watch thousands work for you. Try beekeeping. Bees love to work, and you’ll see a steady stream of the worker (female) bees rushing in and out of the hive from dawn to dark, storing honey and pollinating blossoms in your garden and orchard. To get all this, plus 100 or so pounds of honey each year, you’ll have to put in about six hours of work a year. Chances are you may spend more time than this with your bees as you get fascinated by the complex social structure that develops in the hive.

You think about edible flowers and you think ugh. But not if those flowers are chives. Rick some in a flower bed, preferably the flower bed nearest the kitchen door, and enjoy the lovely lavender blossoms. Throw a few in your salad bowl for beauty and a mild oniony taste.

Be adventurous and let your nasturtiums do double-duty as pest-repellents and gay additions to the salad bowl. Leaves and flowers have a spicy, delicately pungent flavor similar to cress. At pot luck suppers, I can always spot a salad brought by my neighbor, Catherine Osgood Foster, author and organic gardener. The artistically arranged garnish of red, orange, and yellow nasturtium blossoms is her trademark.

Don’t grumble at the zucchini and squash; eat their blossoms before they have a chance to overburden you with produce. Cooks often use the male blossoms, which can be recognized by their long stems. Add to soup, sauté, dip in batter and deep-fry; or stuff with rice, meat, or cream cheese and bake.

Harness the sun’s heat to help ripen cantaloupes. Place a flat stone under melons to absorb heat and help them ripen more evenly. No turning necessary.

For earlier watermelons, pinch out blossoms formed after the first two or three fruits are set, or prune the main vine to encourage side shoots, which set fruit earlier. Make sure the watermelon you worked so hard to grow is ripe before you harvest it:

• Thump it. It should sound hollow.
• Look at the rind. It should be yellow where it touches the ground.
• Inspect the tendrils at the joint just above the melon stem. They should be brown.

Ready to harvest? Cut (don’t pull) it from the vine, with a short stem still attached to the melon.

Take your two-week vacation in August, for best gardening results. By that time your vegetables will be large enough to compete with the weeds, and you won’t return to a jungle of intruders hiding a few defeated vegetables. You will miss harvesting some of your vegetables at their prime, unless you time your planting schedule carefully.

Try pruning fruit trees in summer, instead of in spring, when you are overloaded with planting. Remove all but one inch of new growth of non-fruiting wood. Leave a cluster of three to five leaves at the base. Do this when the base of the new shoot gets woody. This pruning dwarfs the tree, making for easier picking, encourages the development of fruit spurs for larger yields, and gets rid of most of the aphids on new growth.

Houseplants of vacationers will survive for a week or two if encased in plastic. If you plan to be away longer, try this:

• Soak houseplants well with fish emulsions.
• Sink into the ground in a shady place.
• Cover rims of pots with a little soil.
• Cut back some of the foliage on each houseplant.
• Your plants may surprise you by thriving in your absence.

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