The third week of September is a good time to harvest from your garden as the coming frosty weather will destroy many crops.
It is not too late to fertilize the lawn with a fall and winter plant food as autumn is the most important time of the year to feed Western Washington lawns.
A fall-fed lawn will wake up sooner in the spring and crowd out weeds before they take over your turf. Keep cutting dahlias, zinnias and sweetpeas as the harvest will keep these flowers coming.
Q. This is our first year with a successful vegetable garden. I need help determining when specific vegetables are ready to harvest at their prime. We have zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers and corn. F.F., Olympia
A. Here’s the tips that experienced growers use to harvest at the peak of perfection:
Ripe Zucchini or Summer Squash:
The biggest tip is to harvest when small and tender so search under the foliage to find any squash that was hiding and have become bigger than a fat sausage. Overripe squash will be dull with skin. Tender zucchini will have skin that is bright and firm but still tender.
Ripe Tomatoes:
Look for tomatoes with a rich, uniform color as you remember some varieties are ripe when yellow, some orange and some red. At this time of year just pick any tomato that is close to full size, so it doesn’t’t rot after an early frost. Tomatoes will continue to ripen indoors and do not need to be left on a windowsill as sunlight is not necessary for the ripening to proceed. Just don’t let the fruit touch and keep them in a cool dry spot. You can tell when a tomato is overripe when the skin is wrinkled or split or you see soft spots on the skin.
Ripe Corn:
Look for brown silks poking from the top of the closed ears and plump kernels when you expose them from the green sleeves of foliage. For the ultimate in sweetness, poke a kernel with your fingernail and note the consistency of the juice. Clear juice needs more time to ripen and thick creamy kernels are a sign of overripe, but a corn kernel filled with milky juice is perfect. Harvest corn in the morning and they will be full of sweetness. The longer you wait to cook picked corn, the less sweet the kernels will be. Experienced gardeners will get the water boiling, then harvest the corn so it can go immediately into the pot.
Ripe Onions:
The top of your onions will fall over and turn brown when the underground bulb is ready to be dug up and stored away for winter meals. Do not just bring the dug onions indoors however. They need to be cured first. This means letting them sit in a warm dry place for two weeks as the skin dries out. Then you can cut off the tops and store in the pantry. This is why you will see onion tips braided together and hung from the rafters in traditional farms at this time of year. Braided onions are not for decor, they are curing for winter storage.
Ripe Cucumbers:
Harvest early in the day for the best cucumbers and look for firm skin that is bright and shiny. Not all cukes are green or the same size so it depends on the variety when deciding if your cucumber is the peak of ripeness. Too many seeds and a bitter flavor means you waited too long.
Marianne Binetti has a degree in horticulture from Washington State University and is the author of “Easy Answers for Great Gardens” and several other books. For answers to gardening questions, visit plantersplace.com and click “As The Expert”. Copyright for this column owned by Marianne Binetti. For more gardening information, she can be reached at her website, www.binettigarden.com.
