You can ensure yourself a delicious generous harvest by following a few simple rules:

 

• Harvest vegetables in the cooler morning hours as picking them when it is hot can damage them.

 

• Handle produce gently to avoid wilting and bruising.

 

• Keep freshly picked produce out of the sun and wind. Promptly store it in a cool place to keep it from wilting.

 

• For the ultimate in flavor and eating quality, allow crops to mature and ripen on the plants or vines rather than on the kitchen counter!

 

Gardening should always be done without injuring the land, but rather should improve the land, so that it will continue to support healthy plants indefinitely. Therefore, pesticides and herbicides should be used very judiciously, and only in extreme need.

 

Wherever possible these issues should be handled by cultural practices, such as those taught by Dr. Jacob R. Mittleider. These include practices such as:

 

• Swiftly and thoroughly eliminate all weeds from the garden area before planting and during the growing season.

 

• Prepare the growing area for ideal plant growth by double digging and preparing it with soil amendments such as manure.

 

• Water only the plants’ root zone (using a drip irrigations system is best!)

A drip irrigation system on a mass scale on an experimental polyculture farm in Vancouver where the plants roots are placed directly next to the drip irrigation system.

 

• Start plants as seedlings indoors in a protected environment for a fast, healthy and strong start and don’t be afraid to weed out the weak from the strong.

 

• Harvest all plants at maturity to avoid allowing pests and diseases to multiply.

 

• Immediately remove any bug or disease infested plant parts from the garden, and incorporate healthy plant parts into the soil to improve soil structure.

 

• Never use pesticides.

 

If a plant has served you well at the end of a growing season remember to try and collect the seeds so that you can enjoy more high yields.

 

However while you are collecting you do have one depressing fact that you might want to keep in mind. Seeds collected from a high producing cultivar may not always produce exact replicas of the parent seeds so you are often taking your chances. This occurs because plants are bred carefully with a built in obsolesce so that we will continue to buy more seeds year after. With annuals it is often only worth saving seeds from those annuals that stay true to type.

 

Gather ripe seed heads into paper bags on a warm dry day and hang them up in an airy place. Do not use plastic bags since seeds lose water as they dry and go moldy. After packaging and labeling the seeds store them in a cool dry place until they are required for sowing.

Following these sustainable environmentally correct gardening practices will not only ensure you a high yield of healthy nutritious vegetables but also do the planet a favor in terms of keeping it clean and free of poisons.  Recall too that these practices are not a new thing, but rather a revival of the ancient ways of gardening that have sustained our planet for centuries.