Vegetable Harvest!

Time for your vegetable harvest! Vine ripened vegetables are the best you can get. So wait until your tomatoes are bright red, your peas are fat and juicy and your summer squash is just the right size.  It is important to harvest your garden even if you don’t need the food, as many plants will stop producing once their seeds are fully developed. This is especially true of cucumbers, summer squash, peas and broccoli.   Tomatoes will just rot and corn will be too starchy to eat.  So get it while the getting is good.

It is easy to grow to much of some things and not enough of others, so be generous with your abundance and your gardening friends will be too. It is lots of fun to trade your veggies. If nothing else it is better to feed your animals or too compost extra garden produce than to just let it rot in your garden which will attract bugs, diseases and pests.

Watermelons I think everyone knows when a tomato is ripe and the only trick to picking summer squash and cucumbers is don’t let them get too big, but are those watermelons really ripe?
It is tricky to tell when watermelons are ripe until you get the hang of it.
 Is it sight sound or feel? Well it’s all of the above and can take a little practice.

When you head out to the melon patch look for the most attractive melon and give it a thump, it should have a rather hollow sound that’s difficult to describe but once you get the feel for it choosing ripe watermelons will be easy.  For practice, experiment with a bin full of watermelons at the store until you can distinguish the difference in sound made by a ripe melon.

Once I find a ripe sounding water melon I look it over and give it a feel and check the underside of the fruit where it rests on the ground which will turn a golden, straw-yellow color as the melon matures. A watermelon has curly tendrils attached to the vine and the two or three closest to the fruit will be dry and brittle when the melon is ripe.  

Give it a try and you will be sweetly surprised!

Learn more about preserving your vegetable harvest here.