The Harvesting Trick That Will Increase The Bounty From Your Garden

The visual of nursing a pumpkin to a prize-winning size is tempting, but bigger isn't always better in the garden. For a handful of popular veggies and flowers, letting the veggies grow too big will limit the quality and quantity of your produce. In some ways, even the reverse is true: the more you pick, the more you get. The harvesting trick of picking slightly early, and often, only works for select fruiting vegetables, but it's a game changer for the garden.

To follow this and other tips for growing a healthy garden, it helps to understand the science behind them. What we call fruits and veggies are ovaries, full of seeds meant to make new baby plants. When some fruits are fully ripe while still attached, the plant thinks it is time to stop producing new flowers. So letting your tomatoes, beans, peppers, and more get as big and ripe as possible is harming your harvest. Instead, harvest the fruits while they are just barely ripe. For fleshy fruits that like frequent picking, you will want to check daily or every other day during the peak blooming season.

This harvesting trick only works on certain fruiting vegetables, so don't try to early harvest root vegetables like carrots and potatoes expecting to get more! You have plenty of common veggies to try this on though. Green beans are huge producers, and will often have two to three flushes of produce. It's best to harvest beans every other day, snagging them when they are a little plump but before you can see the seeds inside bulging. You can even grow green beans indoors all year-round with these gardening tips.

Peppers are another all-star that loves a frequent harvest. There is a little more choice in when to harvest peppers of all varieties, but the concept of harvesting young to get more peppers from the plant still holds. Ripe peppers tend to show their flavors more, either becoming more spicy or more sweet depending on the variety. Take a few green peppers in order to get the most out of your plant. 

Cucumbers will keep producing with frequent harvests too, and they really don't like to be left on the vine. The bigger the cucumber, the worse the flavor, and if they are left to turn yellow, their seeds become hard and bitter. Whether or not you know the secret ingredient to growing large cucumbers in a container or grow bag, snip those babies off the vine when they are dark green and between 2 to 6 inches or 6 to 10 inches depending on the variety.