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THE PERFECT MOMENT TO HARVEST

8/24/2015

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     We all have different criteria of when a fruit or vegetable is at its peak, ready for harvest.  I expect that this was determined in great part during our childhood, when we first were given a tomato or pear or berry.  As kids, our tastebuds were set for “sweet”, and hopefully our taste preferences evolved into preferring more sophisticated nuances as we grew up. 

     A perfect example is tomatoes.  Tomato flavor is a combination of sweet and acid, with the perfect balance very much an individual preference. Gardeners love to share their favorites, over the years I’ve found some friends’ enthusiastic recommendations to be bland or too sweet or too acid.  I’ve always attributed this to distinctions in garden soil and water and growing techniques – similar to differing results of exactly the same brownie recipes – but also how their personal tastes have changed. 

     Consequently, I offer these guidelines to harvesting summer crops.  The one caveat I insist on, however, is that you leave the fruit on the plant until you determine its harvest-time.  None of this business of picking the tomato and setting it on the kitchen counter for 3 weeks, please!  The whole point of growing your own is to enable the fruit to ripen to its perfect moment of ripeness – whatever you determine that is – and then harvest and enjoy it immediately, or at least within the hour or so.  Best yet is harvesting it and then slurping it right there, bent over so the excess drippings fall back into the garden! 

Blackberries, Boysenberries, Raspberries

“Tickle” from underneath the cluster of berries that are dull matte on their surface instead of shiny, and they should fall into the palm of your hand.  If you have to pull on the fruit, it’s not ripe enough, and it’ll be on the tart side; let it ripen another day or so until it releases on its own.

Cucumbers

Gauge the size according to the variety and your use.  If you’ll eat them fresh, then six to eight inches.  If you’ll process them, then no longer than 2 inches for sweet gherkins, 2-3 inches for baby dills, and 4 inches for large dills.  You’ll want them to be bright green, and their sides almost but not quite filled out – if they’re fully round, the seeds will be too well-developed. Lemon cukes will be light green with only a tinge of yellow.

Fruits, Tree – Apricots, Figs, Nectarines, Peaches, Plums

Stop watering a week or two before you expect to harvest the major portion of the crop, to concentrate sweetness and flavors.  They’ll give slightly. Once you harvest and taste, you can determine whether you need to wait another day for remaining fruits to soften further.  Ideally, you’ll get a good three or four weeks’ harvest from the first to the last fruits.

Melons

Like with tree fruits, stop watering a week or two before you expect to harvest the major portion of the crop, to concentrate sweetness and flavors.  Cantaloupes offer four clues – they’re fragrant at the blossom end, their netting is pronounced, the color below the netting is tan, and the stem cracks or “slips” away on its own.  Honeydews become slightly waxy or sticky on their surface, and their color approaches creamy instead of just green or white. Watermelons will be a dull matte green, the circle where they’ve been sitting on the soil will be creamy instead of white, and the first little tendril and leaf will shrivel and turn brown.  I also knock on the watermelon – if it sounds hollow, I pick it (in the store too).

Peppers, Hot and Sweet

Be sure to keep peppers well watered so their fleshy walls are thick.  When to pick according to color is up to you – green is immature, and color is more mature.

Pumpkins and Winter Squash

Wait until the rinds are completely hard and can’t be punctured with a fingernail.  This is their protection so they can be stored for a long time without spoiling.

Squash, Summer – Yellow Crookneck, Scallopini, Zucchini

I grow only the old crookneck varieties (not the newer straightneck ones) for their rich buttery flavor.  I harvest them when the globe portion is a maximum of 2 inches. The warts should be barely formed.  Harvest scallopini and zucchini when they’re on the small side.  Bigger means overmature, but still ok for (purposely) overcooking in soups and stews, and of course grating for squash bread…..

Strawberries

When my husband and I lived in Altadena and had a backyard of perhaps 1000 square feet of strawberries, we harvested only the dark maroon matte berries at lunch, leaving the bright red shiny ones to harvest after dinner.  What a glorious time that was!

Tomatoes

Fully ripe and flavorful tomatoes will be fully-colored and give slightly. Ideally, you’ll get a good three or four weeks’ harvest from the first to the last fruits of “determinate” varieties, and all summer long through cool fall weather for “indeterminate” cherry tomatoes.  It’s critical to not refrigerate tomatoes, since the chill will damage cell structure, resulting in mushy texture and diminished fragrance and flavor.

And now it's tomorrow!


Go back out into the garden for another harvest of the most wonderful produce you’ve created to share with your family!  

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WHAT TO EXPECT AFTER THAT HEAT

8/17/2015

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Now that it’s cooled down considerably following that week of blistering intensity, there are a couple of things we need to do immediately, and a couple of things to look for.  While we humans can hide out indoors, our gardens can’t escape.  Consequently, their growth was affected in specific ways.  Here are some to consider.     

Water stress. 

This goes both ways – Too little because we forgot to water when the heat was forecast, so plants were depleted perhaps so much that they’ll not recover even with deep watering now.  Too much because we watered heavily during the onslaught, perhaps drowning the roots and activating phytophthora organisms resulting in rotting roots.  Just remove old tomato foliage at the bottom of the plant that's turned pale and brown; healthy growth above will take over. 

Sunburned foliage, branches, and fruits.

If there isn’t enough foliage to cover the branches and trunk of plants or trees for most of the day – especially the late afternoon when the sun is the most intense - they may have sunburned, which may lead to bark falling off and pests boring in. This is possible during the winter as well, especially on deciduous fruit trees – which is why I paint a 50% mixture of inexpensive light-colored indoor water-soluble latex paint on my east- , south-, and west-facing branch and trunk surfaces to reflect the sun.  While it seems counterintuitive to use indoor paint on outdoor trees, using oil-based outdoor paint would smother the tree’s pores!

Pest onslaught, especially of red spider mites. 

Pests that love the heat will take advantage of weakened plants.  Spider mite damage looks like tiny stippling on greenish-yellow or yellowish-white foliage (which should have been a rich green), and tomatoes are a favorite.

Delay in new bloom set. 

Blossoms set well on healthy plants in air temperatures between 55-85 degrees.  Above and below that range, the blossoms stop.  Additionally, they won’t again resume setting new blossoms until that 85-degree or under has been the case for a full two weeks – so it may be a month or more before we get more blossoms.  This is why it’s important for us to get our tomato plants healthy and developed as soon as possible in the spring, so we get a great blossom and fruit set before the above-85-degree heat settles in!

Harvest mushiness. 

This is really an issue of timing of harvest and refrigeration after harvest.  It’s based on cell structure.  If you plan to refrigerate fruit – whether tomatoes or melons or peaches or whatever – harvest them when the air temperature is as cool as possible – ideally 4 hours before sunrise; then refrigerate them immediately.  This means that the cells will not have much change in temperature, so the fruit will last longer in good condition (although some flavor quality will be lost due to refrigeration).  On the other hand, if the fruit is hot when you harvest it, and then you refrigerate it immediately, the change in temperature is too extreme and cell structure breaks down so the resulting texture is mushy.  So, if you want the premium development of flavor and will enjoy the fruit within a couple of days, harvest in the early evening and store on the countertop on a rack with air between each piece of fruit.  And, place each piece as if it was still attached to the tree or plant:  tomatoes and figs with the stems upright, and melons with the stem separation pointing to the side.


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THRIVING GARDENS DEPEND ON APPROPRIATE IRRIGATION

8/10/2015

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     “Brown is the new green” is an unfriendly-sounding phrase.  Brown is a rich color, but not to I think anyone's minds eliciting pleasant visions of thriving gardens.  We need colors for that, including variations of greens like blue greens and gray-greens of many drought-tolerant plants as well as the bright greens of well-watered and well-fed plants.  Plant selection offers many options.

     But irrigation and soils are key to thriving gardens, no matter the plant selection.  However, people generally have a hard time gauging how to determine watering needs because they mostly consider only the plant’s foliage and the soil’s surface.  Everything under the soil’s surface seems mysterious partly because "It depends." is the answer they get when they ask "How often and how much should I water?"

     “It depends” because one garden that’s based on sandy soils will drain much more quickly than a garden that’s based on clay soils.  For both soils, incorporating organic matter like compost will help to both retain moisture and provide drainage while keeping the individual soil particles moist.  That magic balance of air pores and soil particles is what keeps plant roots growing well and thriving. 

     Conserving water use by changing from daily to 2 times a week for 10 minutes each time is a good start for lawns, since the roots are generally only a maximum of 6 inches deep.  Watering this frequently for these short periods of time teaches the plants to be shallow-rooted since more water's arriving in a day or two. 

     But for vegetables and ornamentals with roots potentially going down 12-18 inches, once a week deep watering should be sufficient to keep their entire soil profile moist.  Deeper-rooted veggies like tomatoes and shrub ornamentals - to say nothing of trees - need really deep-watering to keep the entire soil profile moist but draining before watering again - perhaps once every 2 weeks even during our summer heat. 

     Be sure to water in a basin that extends beyond the drip line of the plant or tree, since this will encourage roots to extend beyond that in search of nutrients as well as moisture.

     A soil probe is the tool to alert us what the moisture level is nine inches down into the soil.  The tree needs watering only when the dial points to almost dry.  This is why trees should be planted in their own space, away from lawns and shallow-rooted plants.


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Water when the meter isn't quite THIS dry -- when it's on the line between red (dry) and green (moist)!
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This version has probes for both moisture and pH.
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BIRD (AND SQUIRREL) NETTING MADE EASY

8/3/2015

12 Comments

 
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     The first year I used bird netting to cover a fruit tree so there’d be no entry points for birds or other critters seemed to work ok – although it was a very tiny tree.  I did harvest my dozen apricots precisely when I wanted them.  After years and years of trying to outbeat the birds and squirrels and other munchers, I considered this a success.

     However, extending this success to other larger trees and even that same apricot as it grew – despite my summer pruning purposely to keep all of their heights low enough for me to pull the netting across – ultimately resulted in gaps in coverage and tears in the netting when removing it, especially during those years that I had delayed too long to remove it and branches had woven themselves through the netting.  So I ended up with bits and pieces of irregularly shaped netting intertwined with broken branches and leaves.  What a mess!  In frustration, I stuffed the unwieldly mass of netting and leaves and branches into a container in the garage.

     The next year, I tied opaque grocery-store plastic bags (that’re now banned) around small groupings of fruit, figuring that the critters couldn’t visually determine when fruit color had changed and therefore the fruits were ready to munch, and hoping that fruit fragrance wouldn’t be a giveaway.  Besides, tying the bags on the branches was really easy, compared with the netting catching on every twig.  The new technique apparently worked, since I did harvest my fruit as it became ripe.  

     The following year wasn’t nearly as successful, as many bags were ripped and fruit gone.

     Three years ago, I determined to reuse those bits and pieces of netting from the garage.  This time, I chose pieces that fit individual groupings of fruits on single or closely located branches, tying them securely at their branch bases with “Ag-Tyes” from Peaceful Valley Farm Supply, http://www.groworganic.com/ag-tyes.html .  Once the netting was in place and tied, I created a “harvest hole” by ripping a small hole (just large enough for my fist holding one or two fruits) at an outer location furthest away from the branch and in open space – so, theoretically, the squirrel couldn’t support himself on a branch and reach around to enter through my purposely-made hole.  To harvest, I reach in with my left hand to feel which fruit is ripe, and then with my right hand clip the stem with my handclippers through the existing 1” netting hole space.  This works really well, especially with fruit that individually ripens over a long time period, like persimmons – last year’s harvest lasted for three months, and I got every single fruit when I wanted it! 

     This technique has worked well each year since.  The reapplication of netting onto individual fruit bunches does take some time, but I have to net only those portions of the tree with fruit.   I do try to remove the netting as soon as the last of each fruit group is harvested, but I don’t worry any more about ripping if I delay.  When I reapply it the next year, my previous “harvest holes” either aren’t apparent, or I place them in space or tie them up.

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