It’s just unreal that we’re coming up on the end of August here. This, reluctantly, means that our gardening season is coming to an end soon and we’ve got to start thinking about our final seasonal harvests.
This is one of the main areas where there’s a significant difference between larger “family scale” growers like us and most hobby scale gardens. There’s also a massive difference between us extreme northern gardeners and those at lower latitudes with slower, more measured introductions into fall and winter. Our transition from summer to winter is often measured in weeks and that time is rapidly coming upon us.
In a hobby scale garden, you can certainly be leisurely about your harvests and we encourage that! But, when you’re growing at a larger scale, you really have to develop a strategy to harvest and preserve a good majority of the food. So, we’re going to share a few tips on how we deal with “all the things.”
First, we create priorities based on the frost tolerance of our plants. Our frost sensitive plants will be the first to be harvested. We can wait for a little bit on our greenhouse grown items, since we have basic climate control there. But, anything that’s both frost sensitive and also outdoors is our initial harvest priority. These things must be harvested before our first frost. (Aside from perhaps winter squash, which we typically harvest right after our first frost to make it easier to find them!)
From there, we often differentiate between our frost tolerant and cold hardy plants. The main difference here is whether the plants can tolerate hard frosts, since we’re potentially concerned about a rapid drop in temperatures. If that happens, we’d rather have as much of our frost tolerant plants harvested, since it’s much more likely cold hardy plants can survive a sudden and unexpected temperature drop.
You’ve also probably noticed that we’ve been continually focusing on harvests for at least the last several weeks. Some of it, we haven’t even shown you as we only post once a day and have so many things to talk about! We start our efforts early as a large garden can easily overwhelming.
We also try to focus on completely harvesting out most of our plants, one by one. We know it’s popular to be “ever hopeful” and to think you can “get a little bit more” if you just keep things growing. But, the reality is that once temperatures start dropping to around freezing (mid to low 30’s), growth will slow to a crawl across virtually all plants. At a certain point, we just want to be “done” with our garden and not have a bunch of hanging loose ends out there to deal with. Gardening in the cold sucks and this mentality eventually helps us an awful lot, especially later in the season.
Also, remember that it’s preservation and not the actual harvesting that is going to slow things down. This one’s important, especially for those newer growers that are aiming to preserve. If you thought you put a lot of time into your gardens, wait until you see what preservation takes! It can be a lot!
When it comes to carrots, always wait until after your first few frosts to harvest! Carrots develop most of their sweetness after they’ve experienced frost and some solid cooler temperatures. Plus, they’ll survive frosts just fine. Unless maturity demands otherwise, root vegetables are well protected from frosts. They’re one of the last things on our list.
Lastly, we generally set a target to try and be done by mid-September. This is where we’ll often start seeing dips into much colder temperatures and also where we’ll often see our first snow fall. Sometimes we get done a little early, sometimes a little later. But having that “deadline” in mind is helpful for us to manage our time.
There’s probably some other things that we’ll think about. But, harvesting is definitely now “top of mind” for us and we’re going to be focused on preservation quite heavily in the coming weeks!
