Alright this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
I had a question the other day about harvesting.
How do you harvest all these different things?
I know some of you experts out there know how to harvest and some people don't.
I had a person who's like I'm new into growing stuff, I don't even know how to harvest stuff.
I'm like okay we'll do a segment on harvesting the produce you're growing.
So what I'd like to entitle this is actually sustainable harvesting.
Basically how I harvest is I harvest a couple leaves off each plant, or sometimes a leaf
off each plant so the plant can continue to grow.
So I'm going to give you examples today of sustainable harvesting and not sustainable
harvesting.
Here we have spinach.
So I see all these different spinach plants and my eyes will go to the spinach plants
that have the largest leaves because those are probably the healthiest and doing the
best.
Something like this plant over here looks kind of small and stunted, so I might not
necessarily harvest from that.
I'll come over here to this big leaf here.
When we're harvesting, especially if we're eating it in its raw and natural state, we
want to try and pick some of the smaller things sometimes so we don't want things to get too
big because then the fibers get really hard and hard to break up and chew.
So this one here I'll pick off two leaves off this plant.
We'll maybe come over to this guy this is a pretty big leaf here.
We'll come and get that one off.
But you can see some of these plants over here are small.
I might maybe pick one leaf off of this but I won't do that until all my other plants
are thinned down to be about that small size.
So you can see I can really go and really have enough spinach here to harvest a whole
bunch actually, probably about a salad's worth if I did that.
If you weren't doing this right what you'd do is you come over, I don't recommend doing
this, this is just an example.
The other way people harvest spinach is you can just take the scissors and clip the whole
thing off, clip all the leaves off.
But see when you do that you're shooting yourself in the foot because now this spinach plant
can no longer make you any food.
You've just cut it off, it's going to die and now it's not going to be good.
So let's go ahead and move on.
We'll move on to, let's see, I got arugula in this front bed.
So let's see, arugula's really fun to harvest and that's really easy, this stuff grows like
a weed.
You could cut it back pretty severely but once again, I like to come over to a plant
and maybe pick two leaves off that plant, pick a leaf off this plant, pick another leaf
here.
The other thing cool about arugula is that you can just literally cut off the flowers.
Some people call this, what they call dead-heading.
So they cut this off and the hope is that if you cut off all these flowers it's not
going to go to seed.
If you really keep on top of it maybe you could do that.
But if a flower wants to go seed, I mean the plant wants to go to seed, it's going to go
to seed.
But you could cut this off and eat it, definitely perfect and fine to eat.
So eat your deadheads, don't compost them.
You can also pick the individual flowers here on the arugula too, just like that.
They're actually really delicious to eat, I love them.
Okay we're coming over to the bok choy here, how do you harvest the bok choy John?
So let's see, we got two varieties, we got the green variety here and we have a red variety
here.
So there's red variety we planted in between and it already bolted.
So once again we could cut the bolts off just like that, and what does that look like?
That looks like little broccoli!
Well this is all in the same family of plants and you could definitely eat this just like
you would eat broccoli.
You dip it in some dressing or put in your salad or even use the flowers individually
in your salad.
So definitely usually like to cut off all the bolts, that's definitely nice to put in
a salad and makes it look really cool.
You could eat those.
Let's see, once a plant starts bolting, the leaves kind of look a little bit funny.
They look like this.
You could definitely cut those off and eat that whole thing because the plant's almost
at the end of it's life cycle.
But I'd rather harvest the green bok choy's right now that have nice large leaves.
So I'll go around and see like first I'll look.
First I want to pick off the leaves that are in the way.
Let's see, this one's kind of hanging out a little bit.
Let's take this one off carefully.
There's three leaves.
Now we're going to go and look down.
Usually when I'm harvesting at the same time I'm looking, I'm looking down and trying to
find leaves that aren't like looking too healthy.
So I'll do some what I call leafing and take some leaves off.
Here's one right here, not looking too good and only dead leaves at the bottom promotes
more basically insects and fungus and different things.
So we want to try and get that up out of there soon as possible.
So otherwise I'll look down here and see what are the biggest leaves in this bunch.
Let's see, so here's a nice big leaf.
I'll harvest outer leaves on the bok choy because if you harvest the inner leaves it's
going to damage the plant more and it won't be able to grow as quickly.
When harvesting you always want to leave enough leaves on the plant so that they have enough
area, surface area, to do more photosynthesis.
Remember the more leaves you leave on the plant, the faster overall it's going to grow.
If you strip a plant back to two leaves coming out, it's going to take a long time to regenerate,
so by going around to each plant and just taking one leaf your garden's going to be
more lush and you're going to have a lot more food because it's going to be able to regenerate
and grow back quicker.
Let's go harvest some lettuce sustainably and unsustainably.
So this is sustainable harvesting.
We're going to go around and pick one leaf.
We've picked one leaf off this plant, we're going to go pick one leaf off this plant,
we're going to pick a leaf off this plant.
Wow I like these leaves the way they feel.
They're nice and firm.
We're going to pick a leaf off this plant over here.
Pick a leaf over here.
We could literally just go down the row and pick one leaf off every plant to have our
salad of lettuce.
So the question is John, why don't they sell lettuce loose?
Well sometimes they'll sell baby lettuces loose like this but most of the time this
is a very labor intensive way to pick your food.
Industrialized companies that want to make a profit, this is just way too much labor
and labor is one of the most expensive parts of the equation of growing food.
So they would rather just plant it all and in just one fell swoop cut the whole thing
and then sell the whole thing.
Plus the other thing is these individual leaves don't last that long.
So I encourage everybody to only pick as much as you're going to need for that meal and
then it right way.
Don't save it, don't put it in the fridge, because this is our fridge.
We don't need refrigerators if we're growing our food.
Nature is our refrigerator.
It gets cold at night, keep them cold.
In the day it warms up and everything's still alive and growing.
When things are alive and growing they don't need to be refrigerated.
Happens all naturally.
Okay, so this is sustainable harvesting, picking one leaf, maybe two leaves off each plant,
depending on how big each plant is and if it can afford to give you two leaves.
Alright sustainable harvesting let's do it!
Okay so this is unsustainable harvesting.
We're going to come down to the bottom of this lettuce plant and I chopped the whole
head of lettuce off.
So imagine if you did this for a hundred days or depending on how many heads you eat at
night, your lettuce would be gone.
But in the same token I could go around and pick one leaf off every plant and be eating
for a lot longer.
Some days I'll go like and I'll feel like I just want a whole head of lettuce, so I
will harvest them and then we'll replant that one.
The other thing that's nice about lettuce and you can kind of see it's already happening
on this one, is this is cut and come again.
So you could cut this, literally start to put this white milky stuff out and bleed,
but also what's going to happen is out of the main stalk they'll have these other heads
or more lettuce leaves growing.
Now they will grow back but they don't usually grow back as fast as maybe planting a new
plant.
So you can play around with that.
Usually most of the time I'll pull those guys out in most cases.
So unsustainable harvesting in my opinion is harvesting whole heads at one time.
Don't do it.
Okay, so let's come over to the kale bed now and do some sustainable harvesting.
Once again we have the red bora kale and it's going to flower, so definitely I like to cut
off the whole top, basically top it and take off the flower to promote hopefully more leaf
growth.
We could definitely cut off, I feel this plant has enough leaves to give me two leaves off
that plant, we can cut a leaf off this plant here, we can cut some red Russian kale, cut
one leaf off this plant.
If you just went down the line and did one leaf off every plant you'd be in pretty good
shape.
If your plant is not bolting like this, so this is when it's bolting and it's going to
go to flower and seed.
We're trying to stop that.
But on the same token if your plant is not yet bolting I'll show you what you don't want
to do.
So here's a good example of a plant not bolting.
So here is basically dinosaur kale.
This dinosaur kale is heat resistant and it doesn't bolt like these other kales in here.
Right in the middle here is the new growth.
So you can see the new leaves coming out, so this is a baby leaf here and there's probably
even a smaller baby leaf inside there growing, and what you don't want to do is just take
it and snip off the main stalk where the new growth is coming out.
Because if you do what will happen is the plant will eventually throw out, or hopefully
throw out two new shoots where that was, but now it's going to take a lot longer for that
plant to regenerate.
So on an older plant we're only going to clip off the larger leaves and not where it goes
to flower, because that's also where the growing tips, where it grows the most from.
So only cut off the growing tips when it's bolting or flower.
If it's in the leafing stage, don't cut them off.
So I think we're good for today.
I hope you've learned more about sustainable harvesting some of your leafy greens in your
garden or that you're going to grow here, hopefully.
So this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com and keep on growing them greens!
And harvest them sustainably.