The Garden’s Bounty Overwhelmes
Filed Under: Do It Yourself, Organic Gardening on July 21, 2009
This is that time of year when those who hate gardening begin to love it and those who love gardening start to hate it. Why? Because there are two types of gardeners: those who love to plant things and those who love to harvest things. Rarely do the twain meet.
I’ll admit that I’m a harvester. I love harvesting, but I’m not so big on planting, tilling, or pulling weeds. So for me, this time of year is the best. This is when I go out and eat half of what I harvest while harvesting it. I come into the house fat and happy, carrying an armload of fresh garden produce and a gut full of freshly eaten garden pickins.
If you’re not a harvester, or if you just want to know how you can keep up with a limited schedule and limited energy, then I’ll try to help.
Hopefully, in the beginning, you timed your crops as best you could so that everything doesn’t come ripe all at once. Most common garden vegetables come into season at roughly the same time. Late-blooming tomatoes, tubers, cucumbers and melons, etc. all come in later than do beans, lettuce, early tomatoes, peas and so forth. By planting them in stages, you can harvest them in stages.
Of course, it being July, it’s probably a little late for that right now. There are other things you can do too.
First, know your veggies. Some of them can stay on the vine an extra week without problems. Others can be harvested, but don’t have to be processed or even refrigerated if you can’t get to them for a few days after picking. Understand which ones keep and what doesn’t. At worst, stuff your fridge full of produce until you can can, jar, cook, freeze, etc.
Right now in our house, for instance, we’ve gathered all of our canning jars for cleaning, cleaned out our pressure 
cooker, crock pot, and jarring canner. We’ve counted lids (twice) to make sure we have more than enough and are generally preparing for when we start bringing in harvests. One look at the garden shows when you’re getting close.
If you’re a freezer keeper, then make sure you have plenty of freezer bags, vacuum seal bags, or whatever it is you store your frozen crops in. If you keep a root cellar, now might be the time to make sure it’s clean, the shelves are in order, and it’s ready to start receiving produce. Later in the year when you actually start filling it up, you might not have time to do that.
Overall, your plans right now should reflect your needs. Common sense will tell you what really should be done. Now is always better than later.
Happy picking!
[...] This is that time of year when those who hate gardening begin to love it and those who love gardening start to hate it. Why? Because there are two types of gardeners: those who love to plant things and those who love to harvest things. Rarely do the twain meet. I’ll admit that I’m a harvester. I love harvesting, but I’m not so big on planting, tilling, or pulling weeds. So for me, this time of year is the best. This is when I go out and eat half of what I harvest while harvesting it. I Gardening News [...]