Module 10: Harvest Delight
Finally. Or por fin as we say in Ecuador. Let’s eat!
Preparing soil is grounding and deeply gratifying. Carving out your garden space is an exercise in problem solving. Making compost is experimental and constructive. Planning your food forest is an art and planting it a craft. Caring for your plants cultivates patience and observation.
All are worthy activities and worthwhile attributes.
But harvest? Ah, harvesting is pure delight.
Harvesting food from plants still rooted in the earth is a delight that borders on giddiness. It makes people lose their inhibitions against nature. When I take visitors to our farm into my herb and spice garden, I pluck off leaves and flowers for them to smell. I rub the plucked plant part between my fingers and thumb and hold it up for a whiff, identifying it--tropical basil, verbena, sweet pepper leaf, clove, lemongrass. I hand each herb off to the visitor so I can pluck another. I watch. They almost always take a small nibble, then a bigger one. The same people who tell me they obsessively scrub store-bought produce blissfully chew their way through my unwashed garden.
Cultivating a food forest, as we’re coming to see, is a cumulative sensory experience. It demands the use of all of our senses and sharpens them to a razor’s edge. We see when the first seeds send up their fresh green shoots, we smell the earthy fragrance of ready compost, we hear the buzz of the bee, and we can feel when the garden needs a good rain. Now, we get to taste the first delicate raspberries, the first crunchy carrot. How sweet it is.
Here’s my tips on getting the absolute most from your garden all season long.
Harvest and Plant Continuously
Ok, I promise I’m only going to say this one more time:
Once your garden begins to yield it’s very first useable plant part (fruit, flower, or leaf), your goal is to harvest every day and plant at least one new thing every ten to fifteen days.
Review Modules 4 and 5 on What to Plant When and Succession Planting. Jot down a plan for what you will plant to follow up each of your garden crops after they hit their peak.
Here’s three examples of how one crop can follow each other from
Spring to Summer to Fall
radishes, basil, radicchio
baby spinach, grape tomatoes, parsnips
sugar snap peas, delicata squash, Russian kale
Then, Make a Harvest-and-Plant Kit
Once you begin harvesting, put the following items in a bucket or large basket right next to your door. That way you will have all the things you need for harvesting and succession planting in a convenient place, motivating you to use them.
Scissors or garden snips. If you keep scissors handy, you’ll be less likely to pull tomatoes from the vine or yank spinach plants from the ground when you just wanted a few leaves. Pulling on fruit and leaves often makes “an open wound” on the plant where fungus or mildew can enter. A clean snip encourages fresh growth.
A small digging tool of some kind. This isn’t for digging holes, but for extracting roots like potatoes, carrots, and beets from the soil. Remember Scarlett O’Hara desperately clawing the ground to dig out some carrots in Gone with the Wind? That’s a fair imitation of reality. Soil is dense and clingy, especially clay. Roots don’t just pop out. So to avoid breaking them and leaving half in the ground, gently pry them loose before tugging. I don’t don’t recommend a garden trowel because they tend to be sharp and can slice into the roots. I rely on a butter knife and a large soup spoon, they really do the trick.
A wire basket or colander and a large bowl or bucket to deposit your harvests and carry them back to the kitchen.
A note on washing soil-covered roots: The roots of plants often have tiny hair like strands at the base. This is called the rhizosphere and it’s where the nutrients are exchanged from the soil and taken into the plant itself. The soil caked around the rhizosphere is a power pocket of nutrients, so don’t wash those veggies in your sink and let all that nutrition get washed out to sea--or to the water treatment plant. Instead, fill a bucket or bowl with water, dunk the roots several times to wash off the nutrient-laden soil, and then put the “dirty” water right back into the garden. It’s free organic liquid fertilizer!
Seeds for the next round of succession planting. At least once per week, glance at your seed planting schedule to see “what’s up next.” If you are going to follow spring radishes with summer basil, and snap peas with delicata squash, have your basil and squash seeds ready and waiting in your harvest kit. For every radish you pull, a basil seed goes in its place, and so on. You’ll be much more likely to stick to your schedule if you don’t have to go back to the house and search for your seeds mid-harvest.
Be prepared with Recipes for each round of Harvests!
Ah, now you’re talking. This does sound like fun! Of course, who doesn’t love a trip down the rabbit hole into the millions of tantalizing recipes to be found on the interwebs? But don't click away from this page over to your favorite foodie website just yet, because I’ve put together a sweet little collection of original garden-to table creations for you right here, making sure to focus on the biggest summer producers: greens, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, zucchini, and basil.
Here we go, then, on a seasonal journey to self-reliance, sedition--and delight!
Eat What Grows Garden Salad
Savory Stuffed Squash Blossoms
Summertime Tomato Basil Soup
Cauliflower Zucchini Fritters
Spicy Eggplant over Peanut Pancakes
The Garden Forager’s Pesto
