There is nothing like growing your own food, you’ve got it made over those who must rely on the grocery store or the supermarket for their daily sustenance, because you can pick and process the food that grows from your soil. If you grow your own food, you grown your own food, you’ve got it made over those who do have to depend on the the local grocery store. This means that you can harvest fruits and vegetables when they have reached just the right stage of maturity for eating, canning, freezing, drying, or underground storage, and you don’t have to lose any time in getting the food from the ground into safekeeping.
Whether you want your vegetables or fruits very ripe or just barely so at the time you harvest them depends upon the specific food and what you intend to do with it. In most cases, vegetables have their finest flavor when they are still young and tender: peas and corn while they taste sweet and not starchy; snap beans while the pods are tender and fleshy, before the beans inside the pods get plump; summer squash while their skins are still soft. Carrots and beets have a sweeter flavor, and leafy vegetables are crisp but not tough and fibrous, when they are young. This is the stage at which you’ll want to preserve their goodness.
Fruits, on the other hand, are usually at their best when ripe, for this is when their sugar and vitamin contents are at their peak. If you’re going to can, freeze, dry, or store them, you’ll want them fully mature. But if you plan to use your fruits for jellies and preserves, you will not want them all at their ripest because their pectin content—which helps them to gel—decreases as the fruit reaches maturity. In order to make better jellies, some of the guava, apples, plums, or currants you are using should be less than fully ripe.
With the exception of perhaps a few gardening wizards, it is impossible to control just when your peaches, pears, apples, and berries will be mature. Once planted, fruit trees and berry plants will bear their fruit year after year when the time is right. You’re at their mercy and must be prepared to harvest just when the pickings are ready if you want to get the fruit at its best.
Vegetables are a different story. Because most are annuals and bear several weeks after they are planted, you can plan your garden to allow for succession plantings that extend the harvesting season for you and furnish you with a continuous supply of fresh food. This means that you can eat fresh vegetables over several smaller harvest if you with (and your weather cooperates) and be able to preserve small batches at a time as vegetables ripen.
By planting three smaller crops of tomatoes instead of one large crop, you won’t be deluged with more tomatoes than you can possibly eat and process at one time. Space your three pea plants ten days apart in early spring and you’ll have three harvests of peas and still plenty of time to plant a later crop of something else in the same plots after all peas are picked. Vegetables like salad greens that do not keep well should be planted twice. Plant early lettuce about a month before the last frost and follow it with cauliflower. After the onions are out of the ground, put some fall lettuce in their place for September salads. If corn is one of your favorites and you’ve been waiting out the long winter for the first ears to come in, by all means, eat all the early-maturing corn you want, but make sure that enough late corn has been planted for freezing later on.
Vegetables that keep well in underground storage, like cabbage squash, and the root crops, should be harvested as late in the season as possible so you won’t have to worry about keeping vegetables cool during a warm September or early October. Some vegetables, like carrots, parsnips, and Jerusalem artichokes, can be left right in the ground over the winter, so it is wise to plant some late crops of these vegetables just for this purpose. Green and yellow beans, planted in early May, can be followed by cabbage in mid-July for a fall harvest. Beets planted in the beginning of April may be followed by carrots in July that can be stored right in the ground over the winter and into the early spring.