The Art and Discipline of the Harvest

Harvesting is hard work, requiring physical rigor, trial and error, and vigilance. But it yields plenty of rewards. Jacob Lund/Shutterstock

I grow some of the world’s best garlic—just ask my family, friends, and neighbors. But this year, I almost produced the world’s best moldy garlic. My supposedly cured bulbs were covered in powdery, indigo spots, like toadstools. Shake the box and a light spray of dust (spores?) rose.

Yikes.

Bad farmer.

Also known as “operator error” in the tech universe: I had carefully harvested all 100 bulbs at the end of June, washed off the dirt, then stacked them on my garden bench in a fit of laziness, rather than hang them in the sun as I usually do. Two weeks later, I cut off the stems and stashed the bulbs in a shoebox in the garage.

Two weeks after that, I opened the box to get a few for my neighbor and—sacré bleu! Mildew cloud.

They hadn’t cured adequately. Then I failed to check them regularly in storage, and nature delights in wake-up calls for those who don’t pay attention. In this case, regular (I do mean regular) checking on the state of your stored crop.

Last summer's garlic crop, harvested, washed, and ready to cure. Eric Lucas

After all the work of growing a garden—the seed selection, ordering, soil prep, planting, thinning, watering, weeding, and general fond tending—the actual harvest seems like it should be a stroll down Primrose Lane. Pick a pile of peppers, put ‘em in a basket, proceed to the kitchen, and presto!

In reality, harvest is a rigorous activity that seems a lot like a chore. As summer waned and the number of other garden tasks did too, I spent the past month heading out each afternoon to devote hours to the discipline of picking.

Yes, it’s a discipline. It’s also an art. There’s no single approach that encompasses all the picking of all the pulchritude. Beans are different from corn are different from carrots are different from beets. Pears aren’t the same as apples. Tomato harvest in cool-climate gardens like mine extends well into October, even November. Then it moves into the house for winter, if you practice the homestead trick of bringing the entire plant inside for extra-innings ripening, which can last, no lie, until Super Bowl Sunday.

That’s the beauty of it all, especially for gardeners in northern, real-winter climates where growing ceases at the end of September. Harvest is a journey with no end: In our kitchen, we put something on the table from our garden and orchard almost every night of the year.

Here’s a paint-by-numbers framework for this art.

Meditative, but Not Mindless

Many serenity-seeking humans spend thousands of dollars for mindful meditation retreats in sun-struck canyons or palm-shaded beaches. I just go pick beans and peas, plums and pears, corn and cucumbers. The sun shines, birds sing, breezes freckle the air, and I lose track of time and care.

A good year for the author's Orcas pear tree, a variety discovered on Orcas Island, Wash. Eric Lucas

Daily Is Divine

The garden waits for no man or woman. Put down your smartphone and get out there. Every day.

Learn by Doing

No matter what you read or who you listen to, all expertise is local and specific. When is a pear ripe? When is an ear of corn ready? How long can you let green beans go? Are overgrown zucchini really a crime?

The answer to all those questions is: It depends. What kind of pear? Variety of corn? How will you cook the beans? And the squash?

“An observant local knows more than any visiting scientist. Always. No exceptions,” declared biologist Roger Payne, the first to “discover” whale song. Amen. Your garden is your learning academy, and everything in cookbooks, how-to guides, catalog descriptions, and agronomic bulletins is suggestive, not definitive.

It took three years for me to discover that the Orcas pears hanging heavy on the tree are ripe and ready when the green blush turns to sunflower yellow, and if left for even two days longer, they become mush. The old axiom about corn silks turning brown is bollocks; the only reliable way is to peel down the husk and look.

I’m still trying to figure out how to tell when the ebony tomatoes my neighbor gave me are ripe. Suggestions?

A pair of Orcas pears, one ready to eat—on the right, with the yellow tinge—and one not—on the left, tinted green. Eric Lucas

Pay Attention

Parting the big green leaves of my Tromboncino zucchini vines on their seven-foot trellis, I discovered in that jungle an 18-inch mega-squash. Zounds! Where did that come from?

“It came out of the sky and landed just a little south of Moline,” sang John Fogerty about inexplicable rural happenings. Actually, it arose within the 24 hours since I last looked closely at the squash patch. Given the right conditions, at the right time of year, a fully mature vegetable plant can throw up a fully mature vegetable in barely a single day. One day!

An overgrown Tromboncino zucchini, still perfectly good to eat. Eric Lucas

Get on Their Level

Nature doesn’t always put food in highly convenient spots. With bush beans, carrots, parsnips, strawberries, and many, many other plants, it’s at ground level. So that’s where the harvester must be as well.

This is good for us. Longstanding holistic health evidence suggests that being in contact with the ground transmits beneficial longevity ions to our bodies. So just as splitting firewood warms you two ways, low-level vegetable harvesting is doubly beneficial, too.

Can’t I just bend over to pick? Not me: A nasty fall decades ago left a sciatic injury, which means a half-hour of hunching over yields a half-day of lower-back unpleasantry. The phrase “in tall cotton” 200 years ago described desirable circumstances—no bending over—but I’m not growing cotton.

A basket of freshly picked beans. Eric Lucas

It’s Your Garden, Ignore the ‘Rules’

Every sentence ever written in every cookbook since Hammurabi advises that you select only emergent, young, and tender items—green beans, carrots, summer squash, whatever. Otherwise, your food’s tough and stringy, dry and dreary.

Wrong!

For home growers, the transit time from garden to kitchen is minutes or hours, as opposed to many days for the produce Americans find in chain grocery stores. Your garden’s vegetables aren’t picked one day, dumped in a warehouse the next, heaved in a semi, and driven cross-country to the supermarket, where they’re unpacked and sit for days in display bins cooled by refrigerated tap water mist cannons. If we treated people like this, they'd all be tough and stringy, too.

Your green beans can be picked much later at home than in the fields of California. A zucchini the size of a puppy is eminently usable, though scoffed at in its legendary status as a donation left anonymously on your neighbor’s porch. “Overripe” corn, like big zucchini, fat green beans, and supersize beets, has extra flavor.

Picking Is Just the Start

Storage crops such as garlic, dry beans, flour corn, apples, and pumpkins will happily abide in your garage, utility room, or pantry for weeks or months—as long as you check them regularly. Once fully dry, they can go in a basket (corn cobs) or glass jar (dry beans) and rest happily for eons.

You don’t have to keep it all out of sight, though. Winter squash, pumpkins, and such provide a vivid display as dining table centerpieces or kitchen counter decor once you’ve brought them in just before the first freeze.

Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Linguini

Gardening isn’t a fling-and-forget enterprise. One year, I cut a huge sheaf of thyme and was struck by the notion of drying it in the sun near the mudroom window. But thyme isn’t tomatoes, and the entire crop turned to burned gray twigs in three days.

I grow French flageolet beans that I often bring in just before the pods dry fully. Placed in a box, they‘ll dry completely—as long as I check regularly for mildew. The same goes for flour corn. To ensure thorough drying, you’ll have to spread them out, but that’s what the guest bedroom is for.

If you want ripe tomatoes in February, no problem: Clip the plants at the base, bring them indoors—I use my mudroom—clip off excess foliage, and hang the plants up. Each green fruit will slowly ripen over the next three months. This tactic works well for chile peppers, too, and for both—unlike fresh-cut thyme—bright light and sun are fine.

Do check them regularly for blossom-end rot. The same goes for the apples you’ve carefully wrapped in newspaper and boxed up in the garage. Soft spots on the skin indicate pumpkins are going bad, but all’s well if you cook them right away.

It may seem odd that the rainbow of results yielded by months of effort can become so demanding, unless you frame things right. Let’s try a mnemonic mantra from the old American hymn popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford:

Sowing in the sunshine, sowing in the shadows,

Fearing neither clouds nor winter’s chilling breeze;

By and by the harvest, and the labor ended,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.