Preserving Summer's Bounty: A Quick and Easy Guide to Freezing, Canning, Preserving, and Drying What You Grow: A Cookbook

To everyone who loves garden-fresh food. We hope this book inspires you to enjoy the pleasures of summer’s bounty throughout the year.

Contents

Acknowledgments.

How to Use This Book

Preserving Your Garden’s Bounty

Part One: Using What You Grow

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: A GUIDE TO HARVESTING VEGETABLES, FRUITS, AND HERBS

Growing for Harvest.

Handling the Harvest

A Crop-by-Crop Guide to Harvesting Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs

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T

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: FREEZING

How Freezing Works

Supplies for Freezing

Freezer Organization

Freezing Methods

Freezer Failure.

Freezing Step-by-Step.

A Crop-by-Crop Guide to Freezing Vegetables and Fruits.

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: CANNING

Can-Do Canning.

How Canning Works

Canning Supplies

Canning Basics

Canning Step-by-Step.

C

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F

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: PRESERVING

How Preserving Works.

Preserving Supplies

Preserves in the Microwave

Jelly Step-by-Step

Just for Jam

Preserves, Conserves, and Marmalades.

Flavorful Fruit Butters

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F

IVE

: PICKLING

How Pickling Works.

Pickling Supplies

Pickling Techniques

What Went Wrong?

C

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S

IX

: DRYING

How Drying Works

Drying Supplies and Options.

Drying Techniques

Using Dried Fruits and Vegetables.

Drying Herbs.

A Crop-by-Crop Guide to Drying Vegetables, Herbs, and Fruits.

C

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S

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: JUICING

How Juicing Works.

Juicing Supplies

Juicing Techniques

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: ROOT CELLARING

How Root Cellaring Works

Root-Cellaring Supplies

Sites for Root Cellaring

A Crop-by-Crop Guide to Storing Vegetables and Fruits.

Part Two: Recipes from the Garden

How to Use These Recipes

Salads and Vegetables.

Soups and Stews

Casseroles

Meals in Minutes

Sauces

Jellies, Jams, and Fruit Butters

Pickles, Condiments, and Relishes.

Seasonings.

Desserts

Beverages.

Recommended Reading

Index

Acknowledgments

WHAT FUN it’s been to organize Preserving Summer’s Bounty ! I’ve enjoyed working with these great recipes and hustling up these helpful harvest hints. Part of the fun has been working with the talented people who’ve contributed to this book. I want to thank Ellen Phillips, Rodale Garden Books editor; JoAnn Brader, Rodale Test Kitchen manager; Nancy Zelko, food researcher for the Rodale Test Kitchen; Anita Hirsch, Rodale Food Center nutritionist; Dr. Kenneth Hall, professor of Nutritional Sciences and extension food scientist for the University of Connecticut; Sharron Coplin, food and nutrition specialist with the Ohio State University Extension Service; and Dr. Judy Harrison, Cooperative Extension food agent at the University of Georgia. I’m also extending a special thanks to Donna Agan, editor of Cooking with Herb Scents , and to all of the members of the Western Reserve Herb Society who contributed herb tea recipes. Thank you one and all!

—Susan McClure

How to Use This Book

WHEN YOUR HARVEST comes in, turn to Preserving Summer’s Bounty for all the answers about what to do with all those ripe, delicious fruits and vegetables. Look in Part 1 , Using What You Grow, for easy-to-follow explanations of preserving processes and techniques. We will take you step-by-step through the more complex projects, such as canning, with no-fail details. For simpler jobs, such as making dried zucchini chips, you’ll learn how and why different methods work, along with plenty of time-saving tips.

In Chapter 1, you’ll find each vegetable and fruit listed alphabetically for easy reference. Each entry provides keys to ripeness, how to harvest, how to store produce until you’re ready to use it, plus at-a-glance guides to how to preserve it. There are also harvest hints, recommended cultivars, creative cooking ideas—even safety tips.

Chapters 2 through 8 tell you how to freeze, can, preserve, pickle, dry, juice, and store crops in a root cellar. Each chapter works this way: First, it explains how a particular preservation process like canning works. Then it lists the supplies and equipment you’ll need so you can gather everything together before you dive headlong into a task. Next, you’ll find information on general procedures—the kind of background details that often are missing in recipes but are essential for success. Finally, you’ll get the specifics, such as step-by-step instructions, timetables, and conversion charts.

Part 2, Recipes from the Garden, presents over 200 health-conscious recipes to help you use what you’ve grown and stored away. Refer to it for ideas about how to make wholesome, delicious vegetable and fruit dishes or fast, crowd-pleasing salads, casseroles, herb mixes, desserts, and teas. You may be surprised by all the delicious ways you can use homegrown produce.

Preserving Your Garden’s Bounty

IF THERE’S ANYTHING BETTER than growing harvest-fresh produce, it’s storing some away for a cold or rainy day. The delicious flavors of sun-ripened fruits and additive-free vegetables will delight you while the garden is in full production—and much, much later, when it is safely put to bed. While others are settling for store-bought, you’ll be savoring your garden’s bounty.

Storing what you harvest takes a little time while the garden is producing heavily, but it saves you time later. Then your jars, freezer containers, and dried mixes will be right where you need them—at your fingertips. And putting up your harvest isn’t complicated—not with the clear, step-by-step instructions in this book. Freezing, canning, preserving, pickling, drying, juicing, and root cellaring—it’s all here in Preserving Summer’s Bounty, along with hundreds of wholesome, mouthwatering recipes featuring your stored fruits and vegetables.

If you don’t have the leisure time to linger in the kitchen—don’t worry. We’ve made Preserving Summer’s Bounty user-friendly. We have plenty of quick recipes (along with a few that take a little longer but are really delicious for those days when you have a little extra time). Look for new, faster, and better ways to deal with old cumbersome jobs like making tomato sauce and cooking down fruit butter plus convenient methods for pickling and root cellaring.

Many recipes are tailored for smaller families, who may not have the room to stockpile mountains of canned goods but would like to enjoy the full flavor of homegrown herbal mixes or the savory pungency of herb mustard. And throughout the book, we use surefire procedures, natural ingredients, and delightful recipes, all approved by the Rodale Food Center.

With Preserving Summer’s Bounty, you also can use extras from your garden to produce gourmet combinations, convenience foods, extra-nutritious dishes, money-saving staples, and special diet options—with just a whirr of your food processor and hum of a microwave. You’ll find that your homemade sauces, soups, and salads are so tempting that you won’t have any trouble eating the minimum five servings of fruits and vegetables a day recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It’s a great way to eat well without worrying about extra pounds.

So, don’t wonder what to do with the bushels of beans, towers of tomatoes, and zillions of zucchini your garden produces one minute longer. Save it and savor it—with help from Preserving Summer’s Bounty.

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USING WHAT YOU GROW

CHAPTER ONE

A Guide to Harvesting Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs

YOU’VE GOT your own garden, and that’s great! Gardening provides fun, exercise, and, best of all, produce that you can use in hundreds of ways. You no longer need to be captive to the whims of the market—you can grow what you like best and eat it harvest-fresh, chemical-free, and untouched by additives. You can enjoy your favorite kinds of corn or beans as well as unusual things, such as Japanese pears or heirloom ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelons.

Growing your own produce lets you take charge of the harvesting process. Pick fruits and vegetables when their quality is at its very best and they have reached the right stage of maturity for eating, canning, freezing, or drying. Then, you don’t have to lose any time getting the food from the ground into safekeeping.

Sometimes you can organize the garden so that produce will ripen when it is convenient for your use—and sometimes you can’t. Most people can’t control when their apples, berries, peaches, and pears 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.

Growing for Harvest

Vegetables are a different story. Because most are annuals and bear a certain number of weeks after they are planted, you can plan your garden to allow for succession plantings that extend the harvesting season and furnish you with a continuous supply of fresh food. This means that you can eat fresh vegetables over several smaller harvests if you wish (and the weather cooperates) and be able to preserve small batches as different waves of vegetables ripen.

Time your harvests so you pick each fruit and vegetable at perfection. Zucchini (top) that has been left on the vine too long is unfit for anything but puree. Tender young zucchini are perfect for fresh eating sliced in salads or stir-fries and make delicious pickles. Beets (bottom) left in the ground too long become tough and woody, but baby beets are at the ideal stage for canning, freezing, or pickling.

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. Or you can space your three pea plantings ten days apart in early spring, and you’ll have three harvests of peas and plenty of time to plant a later crop of something else in the same plots after you pick all the peas.

Plant vegetables that don’t keep well, like salad greens, at least twice. Start with 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 you plant enough late corn for freezing later on.

Harvest as late as possible in fall when you grow vegetables that keep well in underground storage—crops like cabbage, potatoes, root crops, and squash. You won’t have to worry about keeping vegetables cool during warm September and early October weather. Green and yellow beans, planted in early May, can be followed by cabbage in mid-July for a fall harvest. You can leave some vegetables, like parsnips and Jerusalem artichokes, right in the ground over the winter. So plant some late crops of these vegetables specifically for this purpose.

AN HEIRLOOM HARVEST

When you are looking for new crops for your garden or orchard, don’t overlook heirloom fruits and vegetables. These are plants that have been passed down for generations by families and cultures around the world. Many have special qualities like different flavors, unique colors, or extra-long storage capacity. Most are open-pollinated, which means that the harvest time will vary somewhat and you will have fresh produce over a longer period of time. Browse through the small sampling of cultivars that follows to get a brief taste of what heirlooms are all about.

Heirloom Vegetables

• Beans, green: ‘Blue Coco’ snap bean, which originated in pre–1775 France, has purple pods and grows well in hot, dry weather.

• Beans, lima: ‘Cliff Dweller’ lima bean, from the ancient Apache culture, tolerates heat and drought and produces light-colored seeds splashed with dark highlights.

• Beets: ‘Chioggia’, an early Italian beet, is striped with alternating rings of red and white flesh.

• Carrots: ‘Oxheart’ carrot, introduced in 1884, grows short and thick, which makes it good for heavy soils and root-cellar storage.

• Eggplant: ‘Turkish Italian Orange’ eggplant, from Turkey, produces small, round, red-orange fruit that is mild and prolific.

• Lettuce: ‘Oakleaf’ lettuce, which originated in the 1800s, has handsome oak-shaped leaves with wavy margins. ‘Rouge D’Hiver’, a romaine lettuce from nineteenth-century France, has bronze leaves and solid heads. It thrives in cool and warm weather.

• Pumpkins: ‘Small Sugar’ pumpkin, a favorite of American pioneers from 1860, is sweet, firm, and tender, perfect for pies or any kind of cooking.

• Tomatoes: ‘Big Rainbow’ tomato, a mammoth-fruited plant from Minnesota, has green, yellow, and red skin and red-and-yellow-streaked flesh.

Heirloom Fruits

• Apples: ‘Black Gilliflower’, discovered in eighteenth-century Connecticut, ripens so dark red that it looks black. It’s excellent for drying and cooking. ‘Grosse Mignonne’, sold as early as the mid - 1600s, has greenish white, extra-juicy fruit. ‘Sauvignac’, introduced in the mid- 1800s near Quebec City, Canada, is hardy to –50°F.

• Currants: ‘White Imperial’, brought to America in the late 1800s, has transparent white fruit and is more flavorful than any other currant.

• Pears: ‘Seckel’, grown in Europe since 1790, has small brown fruit with exceptional sweetness.

• Watermelons: ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon, grown by the Amish for over 80 years, has red flesh and a green rind speckled with yellow stars and a large golden moon.

Handling the Harvest

One of the biggest advantages of growing your own produce—or picking it garden-fresh in a friend’s yard—is that you can handle it with care. Then everything you pick at the moment of ideal ripeness will be perfect for preserving. You’ll understand how important harvest treatment is when you know a little about what happens to fruits and vegetables after harvesting.

Once plucked from the plant, fruits and vegetables stop growing, but respiration and enzyme activities (which add up to aging) continue. The physical and chemical qualities deteriorate rapidly. As a result, appearance and flavor fade, and the nutrient content decreases, particularly fragile vitamin C.

WHERE TO FIND HEIRLOOM VEGETABLES AND FRUITS

To locate the long-lost tomato your grandmother used to grow or to browse for something different to try, check out the Garden Seed Inventory, published by the Seed Saver’s Exchange. This 500-page volume lists thousands of different plants and gives brief descriptions and sources for each. A good resource for finding heirloom fruit cultivars is the Fruit, Berry and Nut Inventory, which lists all cultivars of fruiting trees and bushes available today, along with where to buy them. This 500-page book is also available through the Seed Saver’s Exchange.

If you want to sample heirloom apples so you can decide which cultivars to grow, you can order a boxful from Applesource, 1716 Apple Road, Chapin, IL 62628 (applesource.com [inactive]).

Catalogs That Specialize in Heirlooms

You may not be able to find heirloom vegetable seeds in garden centers, but these days they are showing up in large seed and nursery catalogs. You’ll find an even bigger selection of cultivars in specialized heirloom catalogs such as the ones in the following list. Some of these companies charge a fee for their catalogs, so write first.

Abundant Life Seeds

P.O. Box 279

Cottage Grove, OR 97424

abundantlifeseeds.com [inactive]

Hidden Springs Nursery

170 Hidden Springs Lane

Cookville, TN 38501

hiddenspringsnursery.com

Native Seeds/SEARCH

526 N. 4th Avenue

Tucson, AZ 85705

nativeseeds.org

One Green World

28696 S. Cramer Road

Molalla, OR 97038

onegreenworld.com

Redwood City Seed Company

P.O. Box 361

Redwood City, CA 94064

ecoseeds.com

Seed Saver’s Exchange

3094 North Winn Road

Decorah, IA 52101

seedsavers.com

Seeds of Change

P.O. Box 15700

Santa Fe, NM 87506-5700

seedsofchange.com

Sonoma Antique Apple Nursery

4395 Westside Road

Healdsburg, CA 95448

applenursery.com [inactive]

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

P.O. Box 460

Mineral, VA 23117

southernexposure.com

Southmeadow Fruit Farms

P.O. Box 211

Baroda, MI 49101

southmeadowfruitgardens.com

Ripe fruits like these cherries (top) are best for canning, while unripe fruits (bottom) have more pectin and make better jellies.

Keeping Fruits and Vegetables Fresh

Fruits and vegetables should be prepared and canned or put into the freezer, dryer, or cold storage as soon as humanly possible after harvest. But despite our best intentions, distractions and delays are a part of life. If you find some of them getting in the way of your garden-to-storage routine, at least take precautions: Cool your food right after you pick it. Move foods into the refrigerator, except for tomatoes and basil.

Tomatoes and basil actually lose flavor or quality in low refrigerator temperatures. If you have more of these items than you can eat right away, process them immediately, while all the other vegetables and fruits are chilling. Or put the basil in a glass of water like cut flowers, and leave the tomatoes out of the sun on the kitchen counter for a few hours until you have time to deal with them.

Fruits and vegetables are at their best when you first pick them. And no storage technique, no matter how good it is, will make a great food out of so-so fruits or vegetables. The most that you can expect is to preserve most of the goodness that the food first started with. If you’ve taken the effort to grow good food, you owe it to yourself to make the extra effort to harvest it at the right time and get it into proper storage as soon as you can.

SOURCES OF MODERN GARDEN SEEDS

There are so many seed catalogs out there, it’s hard to choose. You’ll develop your own favorites after a few seasons, but these will get you off to a good start.

W. Atlee Burpee & Co.

300 Park Avenue

Warminster, PA 18974

burpee.com

The Cook’s Garden

P.O. Box C5030

Warminster, PA 18974

https://www.burpee.com/cooks-garden/

Irish Eyes Garden City Seeds

5045 Robinson Canyon Road

Ellensburg, WA 98926

http://irisheyesgardenseeds.com/

Johnny’s Selected Seeds

955 Benton Avenue

Winslow, ME 04901

johnnyseeds.com

Nichols Garden Nursery

1190 Old Salem Road NE

Albany, OR 97321

nicholsgardennursery.com

Park Seed Company

Parkton Avenue

Greenwood, SC 29647

parkseed.com

Renee’s Garden Seeds

6116 Highway G

Felton, CA 95018

reneesgarden.com

A Crop-by-Crop Guide to Harvesting Vegetables, Fruits, and Herbs

Here are tips on when to harvest many of your favorite crops and highlights about some of the best cultivars you might want to grow. You’ll find handy long-term preservation ideas listed as symbols beside each entry as follows:

*The can symbol refers to foods that can be water bath or pressure canned. The preserve symbol refers to food made into jams and jellies.

Vegetable and Herb Harvesting Guide

Artichokes

Harvest artichokes when the buds are tender and full but the bracts are still closed. You’ve waited too long once the bracts turn purple and the flowers begin to form. Use pruning shears or a sharp knife to cut off the bud and 4 to 6 inches of the stem, which can be edible, too. You’ll harvest the large central bud on each stem first. It will be followed by side buds if your growing season is long enough. Don’t be surprised if your artichokes don’t bloom the first year—they’re perennials, so it takes them a while to get going. Even if they do, don’t harvest until the second year to allow the plants time to establish themselves.

You can grow artichokes even if you live in a cold climate where perennial cultivars aren’t hardy. Try ‘Imperial Star’, a high-yielding annual.

Asparagus

In cool climates, wait until the third year after planting to begin harvesting asparagus. But in warmer areas, you can harvest lightly the second year after planting. When tight-headed spears reach 6 to 10 inches tall, twist or cut them off just below soil level. On mature plantings, you can harvest for six to eight weeks in spring.

For high yields, grow ‘Jersey Knight’ and ‘SYN 4-56’ (formerly ‘Jersey Giant’). Because these cultivars seldom include female plants, they can produce several times the number of spears of older cultivars. For warm climates, try ‘UC 157’.

Basil

Keep basil flower heads pinched off for the most flavorful leaves. Pinch off shoot tips when you need a little basil. Or cut stems back by one-half their total length if you want to preserve some of this spicy herb.

SOURCES OF FRESH PRODUCE

If you don’t have your own garden, or if you need to supplement what your garden grows, here are other ways to get ultrafresh produce.

• Place a special order with a local farm market. Have them pick a blend of fully or partly ripe items—as you request—early in the morning and you’ll still have the day to preserve the food.

• Harvest at a pick-your-own organic orchard or garden. If you have several cultivars to choose from, ask which is best for the type of preserving you have in mind.

• Subscribe to Community-Supported Agriculture. For a fee, you’ll get a regular supply of fresh produce and, maybe, rights to harvest produce.

• Ask gardening friends, relatives, and neighbors to call you if they anticipate overabundant harvests. Then you can pick what you need before it gets overgrown or aged.

• Support your local farmers’ market. Find out which stalls actually grow what they sell and establish a good relationship with them. You might persuade them to let you know what produce they expect to have the following week so you are able to make plans for preserving accordingly.

• Put an ad in a school, church, or organization bulletin asking to share the costs and work of a garden for harvesting privileges.

Grow ‘Dark Opal’ basil for making red herb vinegars. With its showy purple leaves, it’s attractive in your flower beds, too.

Beans, Dried

If you plan to dry beans and store them, delay harvest until the seeds are so dry you can’t dent them with your thumbnail. But if the weather turns wet, pick them all, and let them finish drying outdoors. Experiment with the many interesting heirloom dried bean cultivars such as ‘Vermont Cranberry’, ‘Jacob’s Cattle’, ‘Logan Giant’, and ‘Rattlesnake’. Or try ethnic favorites such as ‘Mexican Black Turtle’ and Japanese ‘Adzuki Express’.

Beans, Fava

Harvest plump, unblemished pods of fava beans when very young and eat them like snap beans. Freeze or can them like snap beans, too. Or, wait until the bean seeds start to swell in the pods. Harvest and eat as is, or wait until they reach full size, but remove the outer skin that surrounds the mature seed. You also can let the mature beans dry in the pod or indoors in a dehydrator.

Beans, Green and Yellow

Harvest most snap beans when the seeds are barely visible and the pods are as wide as a pencil, about one to two weeks after the blossoms appear. The length of the pod—and occasionally the width—will vary according to the cultivar. Check the seed packet or catalog description for details. Snap off pole beans just below the stem and you’ll be able to pick again from the same spot later in the season. Bush beans yield only one harvest, so it doesn’t matter where you snap the pod from the bush.

Safety Stop

WATCH OUT FOR WAX!

If you buy produce at the grocery store for preserving, watch out for the wax. Most grocery stores sell apples, beets, cucumbers, onions, papayas, peppers, potatoes, rutabagas, squash, tangerines, tomatoes, turnips, and watermelons that are coated with wax. This makes them look glossier and helps prevent moisture loss.

The wax alone is not so bad. It’s usually made of natural products like beeswax. But the wax is often combined with fungicides to prevent mold problems during shipping and marketing. Since the wax is not water-soluble, it seals the fungicides onto the fruit, making them close to impossible to wash off.

To avoid buying waxed produce, shop at farm markets, roadside stands, and organic farms or co-ops. Or ask your local grocery store to supply unwaxed produce; you’ll have to take their word for it because it can be hard to see thin layers of wax. If you do buy waxed fruits or vegetables, peel off the outer skin before eating or processing it.

Creative Cooking

DRIED BEANS

Spice up dried beans when you’ve almost finished cooking them by adding garlic, ginger, and low-sodium soy sauce. Or try rosemary and finely grated orange rind. Another good combination for beans is caraway seeds, dry mustard, and paprika.

You also can wait to harvest beans until the bean seeds mature and the pod begins to thin. Shell the beans, and cook or freeze them to enjoy a rich buttery flavor.

When preparing to freeze or dry snap beans, you need to blanch them in boiling water first. You’ll know you’ve blanched long enough when ‘Royal Burgundy Purple Pod’ and ‘Royalty Purple Pod’ turn from purple to green.

Beans, Lima

Harvest lima beans when the seeds are green and tender, just before they reach full size and plumpness. If you plan to dry the beans and store them, delay harvest until they are so dry that you can’t dent them with your thumbnail. But if the weather turns wet, pick them all, and let them finish drying indoors.

Harvest Hints

BUSH BEANS

For a regular supply of bush beans all summer, stagger your plantings. Plant some seeds every couple of weeks through the first half of the growing season.

POLE BEANS

By harvesting young pole beans promptly, you’ll encourage bean plants to continue to produce. If you let the beans mature, productivity will decline.

LIMA BEANS

For an early start in cool-season areas, grow bush lima beans, such as ‘Geneva’ and ‘Packer DM’. These cultivars are tolerant of cool soils.

Beets

For most uses, harvest when the beets are 1¹⁄2 to 2 inches in diameter. You can allow them to get a bit larger for root cellaring. To avoid damaging the roots, pull by hand rather than digging with a tool.

Beet greens are good for salads or steaming. Harvest them anytime throughout the season by taking a few outer leaves from each plant.

For pickling, try baby beets such as ‘Little Ball’. For slicing, choose long (up to 8 inches) and slender ‘Cylindra’ or ‘Formanova’. For root cellaring, grow ‘Lutz Green Leaf’ (also known as ‘Winter Keeper’), ‘Long Season’, or ‘Sweetheart’.

Broccoli

Harvest broccoli florets before the dark green blossom clusters begin to open and display yellow flowers. Side heads will continue to develop after you remove the central head until cold kills the plant.

For a big first harvest of broccoli, look for cultivars like ‘Emperor’ and ‘Premium Crop’ that bear a large central head. For a bountiful harvest of side shoots, try cultivars such as ‘Green Valiant’ and ‘Saga’.

Brussels Sprouts

Harvest brussels sprouts when the sprouts reach full size and are firm but before they grow loose, yellow, and tough. Start at the bottom of the stem and work your way up as the sprouts mature. You can pick brussels sprouts for many months, even if temperatures go below freezing.

One of the most interesting brussels sprouts cultivars is ‘Rubine’, an heirloom with beautiful red sprouts and bluish leaves.

Cabbage

Use a sharp knife to cut off cabbage heads once they have formed and are firm but before they split open. If you leave a stub of stem on the plant, it may resprout for a second, small harvest. You’ll have to be prompt about harvesting early cultivars, which pass peak maturity quickly, but you’ll have more flexibility when picking some later cultivars. You can help prevent cabbage heads from splitting after a rain by using a spade to cut off roots on one side of the plant. Split heads won’t keep long, so use them within a few days or make them into sauerkraut. (See Sauerkraut Grandma’s Way on page 123.)

For winter root cellaring, grow late-maturing storage cultivars of cabbage such as ‘Lasso’, ‘Perfect Ball’, and ‘Storage No. 4’.

Cabbage, Chinese

Harvest individual outer leaves of Chinese cabbage as you need them or cut off the entire plant after the head forms. Pull the plant up with the roots attached if you plan to store it in a root cellar.

Carrots

Carrots vary from 2 to 8 inches long, depending on the cultivar, so check the seed packet or catalog to see at what size yours mature. Then pull a sample root—one of the big ones with dark green leaves. The best carrot will be approaching its mature size and width and will have developed a rich orange color. To get carrots out easily, grab the greens near the ground and pull. If the soil is heavy, moisten it and loosen around the carrots with a trowel.

Baby carrots ideal for pickling or canning include ‘Baby Spike’, ‘Lady Finger’, ‘Kinko’, ‘Planet’, and ‘Thumbelina’. For freezing or fresh use, try extra-sweet ‘A-Plus Hybrid’, ‘Ingot’, or ‘Lindoro’.

Creative Cooking

GREEN BEANS

For a delicious, easy vegetable, toss cooked green beans with dill seeds and a little butter.

LIMA BEANS

Puree cooked lima beans with garlic and spices for a quick sandwich spread or party dip.

BEETS

Shred beets and combine them with a small amount of lemon juice. Microwave for two or three minutes, stirring every minute. When just tender, rinse the beets, toss with vinaigrette, and refrigerate until ready to serve.

Cauliflower and Broccoflower

Before you can harvest white-headed types of cauliflower, you’ll have to give them a special blanching, or whitening, treatment. (Some cultivars are self-blanching, so check the catalog before ordering.) When these cauliflowers develop curds that are 2 to 3 inches in diameter, tie the outer leaves above the head to keep it creamy and mild-flavored. Heads will be ready to cut off the stalk 4 to 12 days after tying. Check them often. They should be full but not ricey, discolored, or blemished.

To avoid blanching cauliflower, grow self-blanching cultivars such as ‘Amazing’ and ‘Ravella Hybrid’. Another option is to choose sweet, green-headed broccoflowers such as ‘Alverda’ and ‘Cauli-Broc Hybrid’ or a purple-headed cauliflower like ‘Violet Queen’, none of which need blanching.

Celery

To make celery stem bases cream-colored and mild-flavored, cover them with soil to blanch them for two to three weeks before harvesting. To harvest, slice off the stems at their base. Or lift the plants, roots and all, to encourage long keeping in a root cellar.

Chives

Cut the leaves back to the base when you harvest chives. Take just a few leaves, or cut the entire plant back and let it resprout. Use the flowers to make a pretty lavender-colored herb vinegar.

GARLIC CHIVES

There’s more to chives than purple pompon flowers—you can also grow garlic chives (Allium tuberosum). Garlic chives are very nice ornamental plants for the herb or perennial garden.

They have rich green, straplike leaves, clusters of rose-scented starry white flowers, and attractive black seedheads. (Don’t leave the seedheads on the plant until they shatter, though, unless you want lots of volunteer seedlings.) As the name implies, garlic chives also have a delicious garlic flavor.

Cilantro

Harvest pungent-flavored cilantro leaves promptly, before the plants flower. For a longer growing season, plant a dozen cilantro seeds every couple weeks during cool weather.

Collard Greens

See Kale and Collard Greens on page 15.

Corn

Snap corn ears off the stalk when the silks are dry and brown and the tips of the ears are full. If you pull back the husks, you’ll see that the kernels are fully filled out. Then test to see if the kernels are in the milk stage, a time of maximum sweetness. In the milk stage, if you break a kernel open, whitish corn milk will flow out. Once corn gets past this stage, the kernels become doughy.

Harvest Hints

CORN

For an extended harvest of fresh corn, plant early, midseason, and late-maturing cultivars.

Cook or preserve ordinary sweet corn immediately because the sugars break down quickly. If you want more time between picking and preserving and you enjoy very sweet corn, grow sugar-enhanced cultivars, which will stay sweet in the refrigerator for about a week because their sugar breaks down more slowly. Some sugar-enhanced corn cultivars are ‘Bodacious’ (yellow), ‘Stardust’ (white), ‘Super Elite 181’ (white), and ‘Tuxedo’ (yellow). Another new type of corn, the super-sweet cultivars, have twice as much sugar as regular sweet corn, so harvested ears keep even longer. But they can be difficult to germinate and must be separated from other kinds of corn. Super-sweet cultivars include ‘Honey ’n Pearl’ (bicolor) and ‘How Sweet It Is’ (white).

If you grow popcorn, let the corn mature on the ears until the husks become brown and dry. Unfortunately, getting the moisture content just right for popping can be tricky. So grow interesting ears with colored kernels, such as ‘Baby Blue’, ‘Calico Popcorn’, ‘Little Jewels’, ‘Miniature Colored’, or ‘Pretty Pops’, so you can enjoy them as decorations. Or you can grind them for cornmeal if they won’t pop.

Cucumbers

Check your cucumber vines daily during the peak of the growing season so you can find fruit at the perfect stage of maturity. You want slicing cucumbers that are slender and dark green. Once they begin to turn a lighter color, they are past prime and can be watery and seedy. If you let them get to this stage, the vines will stop producing new cucumbers.

Judge when to harvest pickling cucumbers according to their size. You’ll probably want to pick them when they’re from 1 to 4 inches long, depending on the pickling recipe you’re using. If they get bigger, you can still enjoy them as a salad cucumber. When you cut any kind of cucumbers off the stem, leave a little bit of stem on the fruit.

For a small garden, try bush cucumbers like ‘Bush Pickle’ or ‘Salad Bush Hybrid’.

For unique and crunchy pickles, grow heirloom ‘Lemon’ cucumbers or tiny, 1- to 2-inch-long ‘Cornichon’ or ‘Vert De Massy’.

Creative Cooking

CUKES

For quick appetizers, top cucumber slices with smoked salmon, cream cheese, and a sprig of dill. Or try a topping of cottage cheese, chopped toasted walnuts, and a sprig of fennel.

Dill

Grow dill for its fragrant leaves or seeds. Harvest the leaves one at a time, or cut the entire plant back. For seeds, wait until the heads are mature but not so ripe that the seeds scatter free.

Eggplant

You can pick eggplant from the time the fruits are small to when they near mature size, which varies according to cultivar. But don’t wait until the fruits develop seeds and lose the gloss on the skin. Cut eggplant off the plant using a sharp knife or pruning