Handling Your Harvest

It's important to harvest your vegetables at the right time so they're at the peak of perfection for eating fresh, storing, canning or freezing. Unfortunately, you can't always tell whether or not a particular fruit or vegetable is ready to harvest just by looking at it. For instance, blueberries aren't ready to pick when they turn blue; you need to wait until the berries fall into your hand for optimum flavour.

Some of our harvesting is easily guided by eye. We all know that small green or yellow zucchinis are the most succuluent and that red tomatoes are ready to pick. But there's more to it than that.

Take the zucchini, for instance (please!) As Russell Friesen explains in Vegetable Harvest Hints at http://www.ag.usask.ca/cofa/departments/... the common green zucchini should be harvested when the fruit is only 15-25 cm long, yellow squash types should be harvested at 10-17 cm and patty pan (scallop types) when only 7-12 cm in diameter. Generally, the bigger the zucchini, the less flavour it will have.

If zucchini is a great example of a crop that people leave too long before harvest, tomatoes are a crop that gardeners often harvest too soon. It's so tempting to pick them as soon as they turn red! If you want some for frying, that's fine, but for the maximum burst of vine-ripened sweetness, you need to leave them on the vine for five to eight days after they turn red.

Sharon Faye has written two articles, "Harvesting of Vegetables A - F", (http://www.ag.usask.ca/cofa/departments/... and "Harvesting of Vegetables G - Z", (http://www.ag.usask.ca/cofa/departments/... ), which are outstandingly useful to the home gardener. Tomatoes are one of the many crops she lists, giving details about exactly how to harvest to achieve the best quality. She says that full red colour should develop five days after the first signs of pink show on the fruit. If you've ever spent weeks waiting for your tomatoes to develop, and then only had a small fraction of your potential crop redden before the first frost, you'll also want to heed Sharon Faye's advice about what to do if frost is approaching. If there's still green fruit on the plant, pick the tomatoes with 2 inches (5 cm) of stem attached or pull the entire plant. Store in a cool dark place (inside a brown paper bag or under brown paper works well) and allow to ripen. I sometimes have a whole kitchen full of ripening tomatoes when frost arrives early, but it's better than wasting all that fruit.

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