When to pick vegetables, crop by crop

Why the timing changes the taste

A vegetable is at its best for a fairly short window, and what is happening in that window is the sugars, the acids, the starches and the water content settling into balance. Pick before it and you get something underdeveloped. Leave it past and the plant starts putting its energy into seed rather than into the bit you wanted to eat, which is why an overgrown zucchini goes watery and a bolted lettuce goes bitter.

The other half of it is that on most crops, picking tells the plant to make more. Leave the fruit hanging and the plant reads that as job done and slows right down, so a patch that is picked often produces a great deal more over the season than a patch that is picked when somebody remembers.

What to look for, crop by crop

• Tomatoes. Fully coloured right through to the shoulders, and still firm rather than soft. A ripe one comes away with a gentle twist, and if you are pulling hard it is not ready.
• Zucchini. While it is still about the length of your hand. Left on the plant they keep going to the size of a cricket bat and turn watery and seedy, and they take the plant's energy with them.
• Cucumbers. Firm, with a bright sheen on the skin. Any soft patch means you have left it too long, and the flavour goes before the look does.
• Capsicum. Green is perfectly good eating. Leaving it to colour up gets you something noticeably sweeter, at the cost of the plant producing fewer of them, so pick some green and let some run.
• Carrots. Scrape the soil away from the shoulder and have a look. When the top is about as thick as your thumb, pull one and see. Carrots are the crop where guessing from the leaves fools everybody.
• Beans. Crisp, and about as thick as a pencil. Once you can see the seeds bulging through the pod the texture has gone stringy.
• Leafy greens. Take the outer leaves and leave the middle to keep going, and you will get weeks out of a plant instead of one salad.
• Pumpkin. The stem going hard and corky is the tell, not the size, and it wants to stay on the vine until it does.

Pick in the morning

Early morning is when a plant is at its most turgid, before the day has pulled moisture out of it, so everything picked then is crisper and keeps longer. The same lettuce picked at 4 in the afternoon is limp before it gets to the kitchen. If mornings are not realistic, pick in the evening rather than the middle of the day.

Handle it gently on the way in as well. A bruise is where the rot starts, so a shallow container beats a bucket you pile things into, and anything soft goes on the top.

When you miss the window

It happens constantly and very little of it is wasted. An overgrown zucchini grates into fritters and cakes. Bolted greens and woody carrots go into stock. Anything genuinely past it goes on the heap and comes back as soil, which is a slower return but still a return.

The bit I would rather ask than tell you

Every experienced gardener has a tell they swear by, and half of them are ones I have never heard. If you have got a way of knowing when a pumpkin or a rockmelon is ready that beats looking at the stem, come and tell me in the shop, because I want to know whether mine is the slow method.

Shop related products

• D.T. Brown Red and Green Salad Lettuce Seed. The cut and come again approach, which is picking little and often by design.
• D.T. Brown Zucchini Lebanese Seed. Best picked small, which is easier to do when you planted fewer.
• D.T. Brown Carrot All Season Seed. Sow thinly, and check the shoulder rather than the tops.
• D.T. Brown Cucumber Lebanese Seed. Quick to size up, so it rewards checking every couple of days.

Did you know we also stock bypass secateurs, a garden seat kneeler, jute twine and sisal twine in store. Those are not on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what is on the shelf.

The seed rack sits in the garden centre alongside the soils and the feeds, and the online range is in garden products.

Read next

• What to do with leftover vegetable garden produce
• How to grow cucumbers, and why they turn bitter
• 7 habits that make a vegetable garden work

I check the carrots far too early every year, which is why I eat a lot of very small carrots.

Cheers,
Candeece