To get all the best flavor and highest nutritional value from your vegetables, you need to pick them at just the right time. Some vegetables taste terrible if you pick them too early; others are tough and stringy if you pick them too late. Properly stored, most vegetables will last a while without rotting or losing too much flavor. In fact, you can store some vegetables, like potatoes and winter squash, for months.

You harvest most vegetables when they’re young and tender, which often means harvesting plants, roots, or fruits before they reach full size. A 15-inch (38-cm) zucchini is impressive, but it tastes better at 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm). Carrots and beets get woody (tough textured) and bland the longer that they stay in the ground. You harvest other plants to keep them productive. If you keep harvesting vegetables like snap beans, summer squash, lima beans, snow and snap peas, broccoli, okra, spinach, and lettuce, they’ll continue to produce pods, shoots, or leaves.

A good rule for many of your early crops is to start harvesting when you have enough of a vegetable for a one-meal serving. Spinach, Swiss chard, scallions, radishes, lettuce, and members of the cabbage family certainly fit the bill here. They don’t grow as well in warm weather, so pick some of these crops in the spring when temperatures are cooler. After you start harvesting, visit your garden and pick something daily. Take along a good sharp knife and paper bags, buckets, or baskets. A wire or wood bucket works well because you can easily wash vegetables in it. The table below provides information on when to harvest.

The harvesting information in the table above is based on picking mature vegetables. You can pick many vegetables — beets, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, lettuce and other greens, onions, peas, potatoes, radishes, snap beans, summer squash, Swiss chard, and turnips — smaller and still have excellent flavor. Pick baby vegetables whenever they reach the size that you want.

Try to avoid harvesting when plants, especially beans, are wet. Many fungal diseases spread in moist conditions, and if you brush your tools or pant legs against diseased plants, you can transfer disease organisms to other plants down the row. Also avoid harvesting in the heat of the day if you can. For the freshest produce, harvest early in the day when vegetables’ moisture levels are highest and the vegetables are at peak flavor. Then refrigerate the produce and prepare it later in the day.

In the fall, wait as long as you can to dig up root crops if you intend to store them in a root cellar or cold storage room. Root crops can withstand frosts, but harvest them before the ground freezes. They’ll come out of the ground easiest if the soil is slightly moist. Don’t wash crops that are going to the root cellar; instead, just gently brush away soil crumbs. Use any blemished or cut vegetables within a few days.

If you live in an area where the ground freezes in the winter, you can actually store some root crops — including carrots, leeks, rutabagas, and turnips — in the ground and harvest all winter long.  ....read more