GARDENING: A bounty of vegetables
Getting the goods out of your garden
ACBC caller wondered why her onions were blooming. Yikes, I wondered aloud, when did you plant them? “Last fall” she replied. Oops. Like an early-maturing tween, her onions — normally a biennial — are blooming now because they think they are in their second year. And there is no turning back the clock on kids or onions.
The call was a reminder that even though vegetable harvest season has begun, home veggies are not like mass-harvested commercial crops. Carrots and beets can be picked as needed — thin the rows as you go. Beans and peas can be picked as soon as pods fill out. Squeeze the pea pods to make sure they are full of peas before picking. Some of my early-seeded pea plants are dead and in the compost already while beans seeded later are just producing.
Cabbage is so frost hardy it can be left in the ground until well into fall, so I only pick what I want to cook. Size doesn’t matter. The top leaf of a mature cabbage head will be rolled back, and the head will be firm when squeezed. An overripe cabbage head is cracked — sometimes to the core. When I have too many ready at once, I stretch out the harvest by grabbing each mature head with both hands and twisting it slightly in the soil. This breaks off tiny roots and slows plant growth, cracking and over-maturing.
Garlic grows scapes a month before ripening. These tiny above-ground bulbs compete for energy with the true bulbs in the ground. When I see these curly, bright green scapes, I clip them off, fry them, and eat them. If left on the plant, they stretch out straight, start forming airborne bulbs and delay the harvest of the main cloves in the ground.
Stop watering at the first sign of browning leaves, pull browned plants, and spread them out on a shelf in a shed.
All of the garlic I grow is hard necked with a rigid stalk, so it can’t be woven into braids.
Instead, when the stems are completely cured, I clip off all but two inches of each stem and store them in the fridge in an open container.
When lettuce plants start getting tall and pointy and the leaves become bitter, don’t toss them. Let a few heads go to seed, and they will sprout on their own next spring.
The top cut or “king” head of the broccoli plant is what is usually sold commercially. I was away from my home garden a lot this year, and the sudden heat and drought produced small heads. The teeny broccoli heads started go- ing to seed in my absence because my husband was waiting for them to get bigger before picking them. If I had been more attentive, he would have had no reason to know anything at all about broccoli. The good news is that picking the king head — even one of less-than-regal proportions — will trigger several side shoots, and the harvest will continue well into fall.
Onions, as my CBC caller found out, are not child’s play. I keep onions well-watered and actively growing because each row or set of leaves equals one ring in the onion.
Onions can be pulled any time during the summer, but they don’t store well indoors over winter if improperly cured. If they haven’t started flopping over by early September, step on them to trigger die back. If they do bloom, they are a nice addition to a flower arrangement but not so good for eating.