We’re in the stretch now, cats and kittens — it’s time to pay close attention to your harvest chores.
Melons and pumpkins
Whether you’re growing watermelons, tropical melons or pumpkins, it’s time to check the plants and get ready for the end of the season.
Carefully follow each individual vine and make sure there are no more than three fruits on each vine. If there are more than three, carefully prune off the smallest and/or worst-looking ones to allow the others the energy they need to ripen up completely.
You should also pull off any new flowers that appear. There just isn’t enough time left in the season for those flowers to produce ripe fruits.
Speaking of ripeness, leave pumpkins alone until they’re fully colored up.
Watermelons should be picked after they develop a large yellowish spot where the fruit touches the ground and the tendril closest to the fruit has turned brown.
Pick tomatoes promptly and practice patience with peppers
It’s time to pay serious attention to your tomato plants.
Be sure to promptly pick tomatoes that have completely ripened up. If a ripe tomato sits on the vine in full sun for a full day, it will lose a significant amount of flavor. Important garden rule: Only the leaves of a plant can utilize the power of sunlight. That same sunlight can only harm fruits that are dead ripe.
Speaking of dead ripe, do not harvest sweet peppers while they’re still green, or they won’t be sweet. There is no such thing as a “green pepper.” All peppers will ripen up to a final color of red, orange or yellow, and when they color up, the taste and nutrition increase dramatically.
You can harvest a few hot peppers while they’re still green, but hold off on bell peppers, frying peppers and the other sweeties until they reach maturity (which I personally expect to do any day now).
Don’t make sweet corn sour
If you’re growing sweet corn in your garden, harvesting at the correct time is essential to tasting that unparalleled sweetness.
If you still have the original seed packet and noted the date when you planted, start harvesting on the first “day to maturity” indicated on the package.
Otherwise, most sweet corn is ready to pick about three weeks after the ears show their first silks. You don’t want to wait too long, because unpicked sweet corn will start to lose sweetness after the silks turn brown.
If you’re not sure, choose a big ear and pull down the top leaves without removing the ear from the plant. Use a knife or your fingernail to pierce a couple of kernels near the top; if the liquid that emerges is milky white, it’s time to pick. (Be sure to pick early in the morning and keep the ears chilled until it’s time for them to get cooked.)
Start your lettuce
It may not seem much like fall, but this is the time of year to plant your fall crops — especially spinach, lettuce and other salad greens.
Unlike in the spring, the soil temperature is warm and perfect for fast germination — which leads to superior results. Also, unlike the spring, the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting cooler, which concentrates the sugars in the greens and avoids that bitter taste they develop when spring turns rapidly to hot summer. (These are cool-weather crops.)
Empty a container of dead plants or clean out an underperforming raised bed, level the soil, soak it well with clean water and then sow a big package of salad green seeds thickly on the surface — like you’re sowing grass seed. Cover the seed with a light dusting of soil-free mix, and you should have baby greens to harvest within a month.
Grow your own baby greens
Do you love those mixed green salads from the grocery store? The sweet tiny leaves of different colored lettuces with maybe a little spinach, arugula and some exotic Asian greens mixed in?
Well, you can grow those “baby greens” yourself — and grow them easier than you could full-sized head lettuces. Just get a big package of mixed green and/or leaf lettuce seeds, sow it in a container or raised bed, mist it daily until the plants emerge, and then be patient for a few weeks.
When the leaves are 3 to 4 inches tall, use a pair of scissors to harvest a lane of the leaves right into your salad spinner. (“Cut and come again” style.) The next day, harvest another lane, always being careful to leave the roots and an inch of greenery in the soil. The harvested greens will regrow; and if you sow enough seed, you might to able to work the same area until the holidays — maybe into 2018.
Mike McGrath was Editor-in-Chief of ORGANIC GARDENING magazine from 1990 through 1997. He has been the host of the nationally syndicated Public Radio show “You Bet Your Garden” since 1998 and Garden Editor for WTOP since 1999. Send him your garden or pest control questions at MikeMcG@PTD.net.
