How to Tell When Vegetables Are Ready to Harvest.

How do you know it's ready? It's an exciting time of harvest and I want to guide you with a few ideas of fruits and roots And judging their best time to pick them like melons and tomatoes. We're going to look at cucumbers And also some beetroot and some sweet corn and potatoes So these melons here. Wow You can see quite nicely the difference between an unripe melon Which is still green. That's the color. It's been since it formed about three four weeks ago And a right one and in fact i've been watching this one First of all, this one went rife about three or four days ago. Then this one two days ago And that yellowness has all happened today Compared it was like that this morning and now it's that this afternoon It's a warm day. It's probably 34 degrees in here 27 degrees outside so that's an indication that you want to be ready to harvest them and you notice they're not supported by anything And they only fall down if you leave them on for too long, which means they're really ripe And hopefully with a sharp knife you can cut like that and also looking at this you can see the Cracking around the stalk. That's another sign of readiness as well as the change of color And more than anything the biggest clue is this amazing aroma you'd get it as soon as you walk in the greenhouse at the moment, so We we could just have a quick look at this one and see What it's like inside and then I I want to show you one or two other melons and how different they are This will be orange. I hope because it's a charente And their flesh normally is orange It's a variety called alvaro I am just going to taste it. I can't resist it And I sowed it on the 28th of march planted in here early may just before quite cold weather It's delicious as you'd expect and helped also by The leaves are still green. Sometimes melons the leaves can go off before the fruit ripen or while they're ripening and that takes away from the flavor because they're not photosynthesizing enough to bring in more sugar And it's been helped in here by I use some Red spider mite predator because that can really damage the leaves Um late june early july. We're now the 21st of july actually. So, you know, this is actually the greenest i've had so uh, check out the link for Buying those spider mites In the video description. This is a different variety called emia and again, you can see it's cracking and a lovely aroma as well, so I really feel when you see that It's it's risky to leave it too much longer. I want to keep the stalks actually I will be selling these to the three horseshoes pub and They will keep much better if you manage to keep the stalk on, you know, otherwise they will fall on the ground Well, you know place it gently on the ground collect it later um And then here we have a different melon, which is ogan and It has a green flesh and you can see it's quite green as it grows, but this one is just starting to yellow again These go quite slowly though That could be four or five days before it's really ripe and you can see the next stage there I've let quite a few go on the ground as well And that will go bright yellow probably in about two days and that's that shows it's a good time to eat it harvest and eat it while tomatoes It's a bit different according to what variety they are And you can see all different colors here. This is a yellow tomato That's definitely ready to harvest and with beef tomatoes. They don't always snap off easily. Let's just see if that one does Uh, no, so what I want to do is keep the stalk on the calyx so I use a knife to cut the truss and that's that could This could carry on ripening off the plant It's it's actually ready now, but you can harvest tomatoes when they're Breaking stage it's called. Um I'm, not seeing any here. Actually. There's one just there And this is a sort of yellow orange oxide, which is just starting to ripen You could harvest that now and it will ripen off the plant The loss of flavor from doing that is actually quite small and whereas with cherry tomatoes They definitely benefit like the sun gold from leaving them on the plant until they're fully colored so these are ready now Aren't they gorgeous? um And these I was looking at just before we filmed and this one actually fell off when I touched it So that was an indication of ripeness and how these ones do snap off like that And also this cracking around here It's nothing to worry about it. It doesn't bother me anyway, and they're still really good to eat This is another sign of ripeness And i've got a shrug somewhere which i'm going to add these two And then we're going to go outside and we'll look at watermelon So in the polytunnel, you can see wow, there's a lot of tomatoes suddenly ripening. This has all happened very recently and it's an indication of how Sometimes you're waiting and waiting and then before you know, you have more than you expected Here that is a watermelon which i've been Noticing only for a few days because watermelons grow For quite a long time just as plants and no fruit and then suddenly they make fruits like this And one indication of readiness is just tapping it actually, that does sound a bit hollow, but you're hoping for a Real hollow sound. Um, I would say we're not quite there, but actually having said that This little tendril now i'm not seeing this is the tendril It wants to be more brown than green so that's an indication for me anyway that i'm not going to pick this one yet Watermelons are funny things because they kind of have a mind of their own about when they've got a fruit and They don't really have that obvious sign of ripeness like melons do Like these melons here Fantastic crop of alvaro again on just one plant, but you can see how they're all green and the polytunnel is just not quite so warm as the greenhouse and that's It's nice because it gives me a succession Uh more emia here still all green and the ogan. So that's fine. No rush on there while the cucumber They've been cropping for well over a month now and You know, you've you've got flexibility That's looking good, um You could leave that for another day or two or just get bigger But actually I find it better to pick them at about that stage because that takes the strain off the plant. That's another factor If the plant is being asked to swell this cucumber It doesn't have so much energy to develop new ones as we go up the stem so always have that in mind as well with Tomatoes too, you know if you leave them on the plant too long And they're still trying to make a lot of new ones at this time of year and we could Just quickly have a look at outdoor cucumbers just for comparison Because that's cordon cucumbers Which are the big ones we grow in england particularly and many people are used to buying cucumbers like that and they're growing undercover vertically, whereas these are more gardening style ridge cucumbers And there's just two plants here of a variety called la diva and Are these ready? Well, I would say yes because not that they're big But they're these plants are still young. They haven't grown a lot. These these cucumbers are starting to swell around the shoulder And you see it's getting fat there. So I would cut that one and actually I would cut this one as well And another sign is if you see some skin degradation like here And that's not a problem because with cucumbers you can easily Take off the skins With a vegetable slicer. I do that. I like it because I i'm not a great fan of cucumber skins I really love the the juicy flesh I put a bit of salt with them and leave it for a few hours and they really sweetened doing that So all of that is a great harvest from these two little plants which have Been in the ground for less time than polytunnel not quite so warm, but now it's really warmed up out here They're going to give a lot more harvest yet And now we'll have a look at sweet corn So with sweet corn The tassels need to be changing color And that that's one clue. There's many clues And If you happen to pick one, that's not quite ready as in doesn't have a lot of beautiful yellow kernels on you can still eat it It's still edible. It just won't be maybe quite so nice And more like a mini corn you could eat the center of the cob as well But as well as the hairs going a bit brown These are not as brown as I was expecting them to be actually and they've ripened really fast You're you're feeling for a bit of swelling and decent sort of fatness on these Cobs and actually a lot of them are looking ready. There's A big harvest here anytime now i'm going to pick this one So i'm just snapping it off like that and i'm also looking below it at Is there a second cob and in this case? not really that's Kind of a cob but it's not and so i'm actually going to take that plant out now because It's taking moisture from the other plants. So I remove the plants As soon as i've harvested from them everything they have And let's have a look Oh, wow. Yeah, look at that. What a beautiful corn And you can see a really good set And that is helped by having them In a block like this. It's not vital. I've grown nice corn in a line it can be done but you don't get quite such a full set of kernels because What happens here is you've got the male pollen dropping off this top bit And that was probably about a month ago and You need a male Piece of pollen to fall on each of these hairs which go down that each one is connected to the the sweet corn so Wow, I can't resist just peeling that Let's see if I can snap off that. No, I can't But yeah This also is a super sweet variety Which means you know, it's not only a question of When to harvest it, but when to eat it and these super sweet varieties Stay sweet for much longer than the old-fashioned open pollinated ones which are still good to grow for sure, but those are the ones that you need to Eat as quickly as you can after picking them because the sugars reduce whereas this one they maintain And just on the other side of the sweet corn we have potatoes These are desire Which is a main crop So what does that mean main crop harvest later? You have categories of earliness with potatoes first earlies usually in early to mid-june second earlies early july Now we're in late july usually in august actually Main crop if they haven't got potato black So this is no dig and I'm harvesting them just by pulling get my hand around all of the stems And pull gently upwards and you can see there's the harvest and It's not bad I'm proud of that, but it it would have been bigger if we'd had some more rain We haven't watered these very much. You can see how dry the soil is. It's actually quite dusty Uh, it's also quite close to a sunflower And some people say sunflowers are allelopathic which means they don't like other plants or vice versa But actually it's not that at all. It's just that they take a lot of moisture to grow themselves, but I love sunflowers. So i'm very happy to Put up with a slightly smaller potato harvest And it's good to compost all of this the bits you don't eat Now you can see the potato seed there. So that's the seed that we planted in April in this case And that's good to compost as well. So all of that can go on the compost heap And i'm going to put this in my truck and then we're going to have a look at beetroot two more things about the potatoes is one that they You can see they're still quite green and that's an indication. They're more growing to be had especially if we can water them And they are quite close. So we put them in just 18 inches 45 centimeters apart And for potatoes that is quite close especially for main crop Uh, it's a bit the same here actually with beetroot. So These beetroot are spaced multi-zone clumps at not much more than a foot or 30 centimeters apart and they're also quite close to the celeriac There so this is really intensive cropping in a small space and already this year we've had carrots there There are only a couple of kilos of carrots from a March sowing They harvested in early june and these little seedling multi-zone clumps went in the ground on the 8th of june Which is just 43 days ago. And so in not much more than seven weeks. They've done all that and it slightly caught me by surprise actually because What i'm a bit concerned about now is with As beetroot get bigger they're taking more moisture and nutrients from around them and they will somewhat compromise the growth of the celeriac So what you can do with multi-zone is it's not so much. When are they ready? It's when are you ready to eat them? And if you want some you can just do that twist out a bigger one from a clump And again, I could do the same there You can see how easily they come out. This is kyojo, which has the beautiful white rings in really sweet beetroot And here we have flaming barrel, which is more a golden yellow beetroot Again, i'll twist out the bigger one like that and then You can see how they are also quite close to dwarf french beans here So, you know juggling a lot of a small space here to get more harvest Which is very doable, but you need to be on it with harvesting And so there's a lot to eat all the time. It's a really nice Problem to have And behind here there's another vegetable which has quite a variable date of harvest and that's celery So as long as you keep it watered today, uh, we didn't get around to watering the celery, but normally do and It's it's ready when you want it. You know, this would grow bigger if you can keep watering Uh, even though the spacing is quite close. You can see it's not much more than nine inches 22 centimeters there There's a lot of celery here variety called tango sewn in Early april planted early middle of may roughly And I cut it just below the stalk There are many ways of doing this, you know, you could Cut it like that and you'll get some regrowth um, I don't actually want that i'm happy to let the celery um Just have one harvest like that All of that is edible and you can use the leaves stalks everything celery is a really good value vegetable from that point of view And there's just one more thing I want to show you in this video because today we were Harvesting the red onions finally red onions tend to come a little bit later than yellow onions my yellow onions actually were the Rose de roscoff, which you just got one clump there And and that's these ones And you can see how beautiful rose or pink color they have on the bulb You can also see how the tops are much more dry compared to the Red onions red barren here growing from seed multi-zone clumps again No bolters growing from seed is really reliable and They're decent sized bulbs, but look how green the leaves still are so with onions You're not always looking for the leaves to go yellow But what was happening before we pulled them today Probably about three quarters of the stalks of stems had fallen already and we put it like this to Make sure all the stems so they've been pushed down to really Make sure there's a tight neck there So you don't want a fat neck for them to store well when you come to just cut cut the yellow top off So these will stay here for about a week or 10 days They're fine in the sun, but it's good to have them pointing down if you can And they'll be slowly ripening And then here to finish there's just a very different kind of onion Which is long red florence or tropia longer And it's just beautiful. It's not a big one for storing beyond about November december, but it's it's such a sweet and tasty onion that I love to grow it And these also were multi-sown and yeah, there weren't many plants there and got all of these onions, so Check out my other videos on multi-sowing and on these other things It's no dig that really makes life easy because onions can be quite difficult to weed otherwise And we are going to publish Quite soon in another video about how to grow all these beautiful vegetables in more detail