Tips and Tricks to Ensure a Good Harvest

How’s your vegetable garden doing?

Are you hauling in big baskets and bowls of veggies and covering your kitchen counter with the bounty of your garden now?

Or are you, like me, waiting, pondering, searching, seeking, and wondering just when you’ll get that first big deluge of veggies this season?

In my garden I’ve picked green beans and a few cherry and cocktail tomatoes, plus a handful of peppers and one zucchini squash. Why are all the tomatoes still green? Why are the squash and cucumber plants being so stingy? And honestly, the peppers could do better too.

What’s a gardener to do?

Employ one of my secret tips and tricks to ensure a great harvest!

Note: Before I share these, I assume you planted an appropriate amount of vegetable plants, have kept your garden more or less weeded, and have watered when needed. In other words, you’ve covered the basics. Only then can these tips and tricks be used.

If you still aren’t getting that big harvest of your dreams, here are the four secret tips and tricks you can try.

Go out to the garden empty-handed. Don’t take baskets or bowls or wear a fancy gardening apron with big pockets. Before you know it, you’ll see a squash ready to pick, a couple of peppers, and possibly a mess of green beans. Too much to carry! Hooray. Go back and get the harvest containers and pick away.

Saunter out to the garden just after you’ve gotten all cleaned up and are wearing clothes you want to keep clean. In no time at all, you’ll notice that there are green beans to pick! And you will feel certain if you don’t pick them right away, they’ll turn all tough and stringy in the sun. You now have just two choices, to either risk getting dirty picking them all or running back in to change clothes and then picking them all.

Head out to the garden for a quick look while others are waiting on you. In that quick look you might discover zucchini squash ready to turn from veggie to giant club if not picked within the next five minutes. Then you’ll notice red on the tomatoes, and of course, more green beans to pick. Unfortunately, your friends and family will just have to wait, as veggies ready to pick wait for no harvester!

Buy a bunch of produce at the farmer’s market. If you are about to give up on your own garden ever ripening any tomatoes or producing any cucumbers, you can always go to the local farmer’s market and buy your produce. Once you have proudly spread the purchased veggies on your kitchen counter, head out to your own garden. Ta da! You’ll have more to pick than you ever hoped for.

Of course, if you’re really desperate, you can combine one or more of these tips and tricks. However, beware of heading out in clean clothes with no bowls or basket while people are waiting on you, just after you’ve been to the farmer’s market. You honestly may not be ready for such a bountiful harvest.

You’re welcome,

Carol

P. S. If none of the above methods encourage your garden to be more productive, there is one final trick you can try. Go on vacation and leave someone else in charge of your garden. Encourage them to pick whatever is ripe and enjoy it for themselves. No doubt, they’ll soon be sending you pictures of a harvest that you won’t even believe is from your garden. But don’t be envious or tempt to rush back home. Remind yourself that you went on a vacation and surely, hopefully, the garden will still be producing when you return.