I don’t know about you, but sometimes life gets in the way of things. After all that patient hard work germinating, transplanting and worrying and watering the plants, I sometimes don’t get to enjoy the harvest!
I’ve narrowed this down to two things, sometimes there is a glut of food and other times, I’ve not got a good process for harvesting. For instance, at the moment, I’ve got waay too many parsnips and perpetual spinach. There is a great abundance of leafy greens and sweet fat parsnips, but realistically we won’t eat it all, let alone harvest it all before it goes to seed which is a great problem to have. So how can I get better at harvesting efficiently?
So far, I’ve relied on having a set day of the week to harvest (usually on a Thursday) but it’s often quite a messy affair. The parsnips will be encrusted in mud or soil depending on the weather and the spinach will often need a thorough wash too- looking out for snails or other little bugs. I’ve found that this is something that requires a level of some diligence and routine to minimise the chances of wastage.
In researching the topic, I’ve found that different people do different things. However, the one thing that stands out is having a dedicated space next to the allotment where the processing takes place. Also, having the required things, such as food buckets, trugs, a colander, some water to clean everything, a knife all come to mind. Having these in place, means that when you get home, there’s just one last check to do before your harvest takes pride of place in the fridge waiting to be eaten.
This month, May 2024, I plan to set up a ‘harvesting’ station at the allotment with two or three food buckets (one for ‘dirty’ washing and the other clean) and the containers to collect the food into. I already have a plastic greenhouse which can be used as a storage area whilst I’m harvesting. There is a water butt with clean water as well as council supplied water on site. I will need to experiment and see if I need a ‘drainage’ channel to get rid of excess/ dirty water or not.
So my shopping list looks like this:
-5 food buckets with lids (food safe), or 5 tub trugs and 2 colanders to make storage easy
-10 standard airtight boxes to store processed food into (mainly for salads/leaves)
-A salad spinner/ mesh bag
-A good harvesting knife
-A supply of plastic bags, rubber bands and kitchen towels
-A fruit box (recycled) from the supermarket.
Conclusion
Having a dedicated harvesting day helps a lot. But to get to the next level, it’s important to actually get the produce into a user friendly state as early as possible just after harvesting. ‘Automating’ the process makes it easier to do even when life is busy. It means that when you leave the allotment, the product is already in a usable state. You are less likely to bring in slugs, dirt and other pests into the house and more likely to eat your veggies!
Thanks to @https://steverichards.notion.site/Harvesting-4d6644fef5ab4b8f89cb722f50dbaedb for this article. His research and advice was invaluable for this post.
Over to you, how do you process your harvest? Are there any hacks you can share?