How to Harvest, Store, & Preserve Your Garden Vegetables

And after you pick your vegetables, what if you can’t eat them right away? When properly stored, most vegetables last a while without rotting or losing too much flavor (of course, eating them fresh picked is always the best).

In fact, you can store some vegetables, like potatoes and winter squash, for months. So in this article, I discuss harvesting and storing your fresh vegetables. You put in too much work not to do the final steps just right.

A 15-inch zucchini is impressive, but it tastes better at 6 to 8 inches. Similarly, during the growing season carrots and beets tend to get woody (tough textured) and bland the longer they stay in the ground. The table below provides specific information on when to harvest a variety of veggies.

For more about harvesting and preserving what you grow, and all the phases of vegetable gardening, including preparing the soil, planting, maintaining, and much more, check out Vegetable Gardening For Dummies, 3rd Edition.

When to Harvest Vegetables

A good vegetable harvesting rule for many of your early crops is to start picking them when you have enough of a vegetable for a one-meal serving. Spinach, Swiss chard, scallions, radishes, lettuce, and members of the cabbage family certainly fit the bill here. These veggies don’t grow as well in warm weather, so pick these crops in the spring when temperatures are cooler.

The vegetable harvest information in the above table is based on picking mature or slightly immature vegetables. But many vegetables can be picked smaller and still have excellent flavor. Pick baby vegetables whenever they reach the size that you want.

The following vegetables can be picked small: beets, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, cucumbers, lettuce and other greens, onions, peas, potatoes, radishes, snap beans, summer squash, Swiss chard, and turnips. In addition, some small varieties of corn and tomatoes fit the baby-vegetable mold.

Be sure to avoid harvesting at the following times:

You also can create cold and moist conditions in a root cellar. An unheated basement works well as a root cellar. However, these days, most homes have heaters or furnaces in the basement, which make the conditions too warm for storing vegetables. But if you don’t have a heater, or if you can section off a portion of your basement and keep temperatures just above freezing, you can store vegetables like root crops and even cabbage for long periods of time.

In the table below, I provide specifics on how to store your vegetables so that after you pick them, you quickly know what to do with them (that is, if you don’t eat them right away). The table also includes information on whether you can freeze, dry, or can vegetables, topics that I cover later in this article.

Storing Fresh Vegetables

If you live in an area where the ground freezes in the winter, you can actually leave some root crops — including carrots, leeks, rutabagas, and turnips — in the ground and harvest all winter long.

After a good, hard frost, but before the ground freezes, cover your vegetable bed with a foot or more of dry hay. Cover the hay with heavy plastic (4 to 6 millimeters) and secure the edges with rocks, bricks, or heavy boards. The plastic keeps rain and snow from trickling down through the hay and rotting your vegetables, and it also keeps the soil from freezing solid. You can harvest periodically through winter, but be careful to re-cover the opening after each harvest.

You also can freeze some vegetables, like beans or peas, whole. But usually you have to blanch them first to preserve their color and texture. Blanching is simply the process of dipping the vegetables in boiling water for a minute or two and then placing them in ice water to cool them off. Then you dry the vegetables with a towel and freeze them in labeled plastic freezer bags. Simple.

Spoilage is always a concern, so before drying your vegetables, you may need to get some additional information. You usually need to store dried vegetables in airtight containers; lidded jars work well. You can use dried vegetables to make soups and sauces.

For more help with preserving canning and preserving, check out Canning and Preserving For Dummies by Amelia Jeanroy. Your local Cooperative Extension Service office also is a good source of information on preserving vegetables. Finally, the Learning Library at the National Gardening Association’s website has a treasure trove of veggie preserving knowledge.

Charlie Nardozzi is a nationally recognized garden writer, radio and TV show host, consultant, and speaker. Charlie delights in making gardening information simple, easy, fun, and accessible to everyone. The National Gardening Association is the leading garden-based educational nonprofit organization in the United States, providing resources at garden.org and kidsgardening.org.