December Gardening in South Florida: How To Start Harvesting Your Bounty!

Hellooooooooo December! How we gardeners (who work outside year round) missed your short cool sparkling days and slightly cooler breezes. This time of year most of our big garden projects have been planted with fall crops and the heavy work has been accomplished. If you planted some quick growing crops in October then they are likely ready to harvest, and we know that harvesting is a big sticky spot for beginners. We wish there was an easy answer to “how do I harvest things” but every single plant requires a slightly different harvesting technique. While we cant show you how to harvest every single crop you might have planted we do have a few general tips to help you get comfortable approaching your new garden with a pair of snippers.

Our first tip for learning how to harvest is “google it”. Now, we know that doesn’t sound as helpful as we mean it to be, because like, you know you can google it. But seriously... use the internet wisely and look for easy to understand resources including the websites of seed companies that have things like maturity date for all of their varieties and videos of people doing exactly what you want to do. Let’s use French Breakfast radishes as an example. According to Johnnys Select Seed, these radishes are ready to harvest at 21 days old. Make sure you also notice the photos of the variety and any other listed info, like maybe how big they are supposed to be at maturity (for this radish it says 2” long and finger thickness) because you can also just use your eyes many times to compare what you have in your garden to what you’re used to seeing at the store, on your plate or online and using that as a cue that your crop is ready. After reading about the variety on the Johnnys website we googled “how to harvest radishes” and found this cute video of a home gardener harvesting his radishes. Now, after watching this you might be thinking like, it wasn’t very technical and he didn’t do much more than pull it out. But guess what?! That’s how easy It is to harvest a radish… you just determine wether or not you think its ready, and then pull it out! Also, for many crops there isn’t a moment that the plant becomes “edible”… Its always edible, so really you can harvest it anytime. Radishes are a perfect example of that, because people eat radishes as micro greens at 7 days old and they eat them fully grown at 21 and every day in between.

Now check out the photo on the left... this is what "french breakfast" radishes look like after 21 days of growth in full sunlight with proper spacing. But that doesn't mean all radishes look the same or grow as fast. Daikon radishes, pictured on the right, are much larger, need more space per plant (thin to 4-6 inches) and about 50 days to reach maturity. When they are fully grown they are about 8-12 inches long! Every variety is going to have different coloration, dates to maturity, and growth pattern depending on their size and other genetic traits, so make sure you make note of what varieties you are planting, either on tags in the garden or in a notebook. 

If you head to your french breakfast radish patch 21 days after you planted them and they don’t look ready to be eaten, then thats a sign that something wasnt quite right in the life of the plant. As a savvy new gardener you can use that information to try and figure out what happened that sent your crop off course. To try and diagnose what might have happened, we suggest you collect data and head to the internet, where local gardening forums are full of hobbyists waiting to show you how much they know about gardening. Posting a clear photo and describing your issue properly will get you loads of helpful information, so again, knowing what variety you’re working with, when it was planted, etc. are all super critical pieces of information for knowing whats going right or wrong in your harvest. (ps: the most likely culprit if your radishes didnt bulb up is that you didn’t thin them properly!)

Our second tip for figuring out harvesting is if you want to eat it, just do it! Like we just said, many plants are edible at every stage of their growth, so if you use proper harvesting techniques you can really eat things anytime. Kale is a good example to use here, because you can eat kale at any point from micro greens to baby leaf to mature, but if you snip the whole growing tip off of your plant when harvesting it then its done, no more kale no matter how old the plant is. There are ample helpful videos of gardeners harvesting kale properly if you google “how to harvest kale”.

In the photo on the left the yellow arrow is pointing to the growing tip of a young kale plant. If you think of the growth pattern of the kale as like an ornamental fountain shooting into the air, the growing tip is the center of the it where the water is shooting up in a concentrated stream. All of the new leaves start as tiny leaves in the center and get larger as they mature and become the outer leaves. In the copy of the same photo on the right the yellow arrows are pointing to the most mature leaves. note how they are on the most exterior part of the plant and their stems attach lowest down to the main stalk. to properly harvest this kale you would simply remove the outer leaves by cutting them off at the base. 

This technique, of strategically removing the oldest leaves from the bottom of the plant, is referred to as “cut and come again” and we do it for most greens including baby ones like mustards, arugula & lettuce. Tiffany was just lamenting not having made a video of us using this method to harvest but rejoice! Lots of other gardeners have done that before us, so here’s a great clear video of a home gardener using this method to harvest his lettuce. In this video he shows two techniques, one where you tediously harvest leaf by leaf, and one where you cut the whole head with a knife just above the crown (so as to not damage it) which is how we tend to harvest denser plantings like arugula without having to go leaf by leaf.

These yardlong beans are ready at about 1 foot long and need to be harvested every day if you want them all to be tender and crispy. After a few weeks the plants will slow down, make less fruit and we will remove them. 

Fruiting plants, including long term crops like tomatoes and quick crops like cucumbers, zucchini and bush beans needs to be harvested on a regular basis for a good yield. When I say regularly I mean every two to three days! All annuals are biologically designed to make seeds within a short period of time and then die after dropping their seeds for the next generation. Fruits are vessels for seeds so crops like cucumbers, zucchini and beans are basically seed pods that we eat! Once a plant puts on fruit it is triggered to stop making new flowers and new fruit. In order to get a bigger and longer lasting yield we harvest their fruit regularly to encourage new blooms and new fruit. Keep in mind that we eat the majority of these fruits when they are very young because that is when they are edible. A cucumber or bean that has been sitting on the plant for even a few days too many becomes so tough and fibrous that it is no longer edible and the seeds start to mature and become hard. Also keep in mind that quick fruiting plants like cucumbers, zucchini and bush beans not only mature quickly and produce their harvest quickly, they also die early! It's normal for these plants to produce fruit for about 2 weeks and then sort of crap out. In order to make the most use of your garden it is up to you to remove these "spent" plants and add them to the compost. Doing that promptly makes room for a new batch of crops and also helps to prevent disease from spreading which often builds up on older plants. 

This Gretel white eggplant is a great example of how important it is to know what variety you're growing. If as a newbie gardener you were waiting for this thing to turn purple before harvesting you'd certainly miss out on it while its young enough to eat, because its never going to turn purple! This variety is a small white variety that is mature at a hands length.

In this photo there are both mature and immature sugar rush peach peppers. All pepper varieties can be eaten green/ unripe or ripe (red or orange depending on the variety), however the flavor of the pepper really comes in when its allowed to color. Even green peppers like shishitos and cubanelles will color if left on the plant long enough.  

At farms lots of effort is put into “post harvest storage and handling” to keep the harvest fresh for as long as possible, and while that isn’t as important in your home garden because you aren’t distributing a product its still good to know the basics so that your harvest stays crisp in the fridge. First, make sure to harvest either in the morning or the evening instead of during the heat of the day. Plants sweat via their leaves and they are the most dehydrated when its the hottest and sunniest, so harvesting your leaves in the morning when the plant already has lots of moisture within its cells is pretty much the number one key to long term storage success. The second technique for crisp hydrated greens is “hydro cooling” them which is just a fancy way to say “dip them in cool water”. To do this fill a bowl bucket or the sink with cool water and throw the greens in. You can agitate them a bit if they’re dirty but you can also just let them float around for 10 - 15 minutes to cool down and soak up some extra moisture. Once they’re done with bath time they need to be dried or they wont store well. Drying can happen passively (lay out a clean kitchen towel, spread the greens out, let them slowly dry) or actively (with a salad spinner) and once the bounty is ready to go in the fridge it needs to be kept in something that will hold humidity, like a used plastic bag. While we don’t like adding more plastic to the world plastic is the best material for storing green leaves since they will dehydrate if kept bare (even in the crisper drawer) or in something porous like brown paper bags. If you shop at French Farms and buy his infamous salad mixes keep the reusable ziplocks that he sells his product in and use them at home for your veggie storage, they are sturdy enough to be used over and over again and are designed for long term high quality salad storage. You can also use used shopping bags, or if you don’t want to use plastic then your best option is fabric draw string bags that you get damp before using. If you use these (or a damp tea towel will also serve the same function) you’ll need to continually dampen them as they dry out in your fridge.