 So we are finally to the pruning and harvesting stage, which means you're going to be getting consistent harvests from your garden now. We're gonna talk about how to go about that pruning process as well as when it is time to harvest the goods from the garden. So I was just gone for nearly two weeks from this garden and while I was gone, it did not get much maintenance. So we just did a little pruning, just to spruce it up for this time that we have together. And this is what we pulled off and some of this is wonderful stuff for eating. Some of this will go into the compost. Pruning is a natural part of it if we are gone for extended periods of time or if you had some heavy pest pressure that you were dealing with, things may get beat up to the point where you'd prefer not to eat them. At that point, you can compost it and give it back to the soil and the fertility in the garden. Not everything is going to make it to the table, but a good portion should, especially if you're out there on a regular basis. So today we are going to do a little bit of harvesting of your root veggies, your greens and your herbs. And we're going to teach you how to harvest and prune those with some basic strategies that can be used amongst those three different categories. So the root crops tend to be the easiest to identify as far as like when it's time or as they're ready. You're going to be literally just pulling it out of the ground nice and simple, not much thought process there. So you guys have in your packs the carrots, the radishes and the turnips. All three of those would fall into the root crop category. So we're not going to go over all of the days to maturity in this video. Instead, you can reference the growing guide and in that we give that range of how long it takes for most things to be maturity. So know how long you should generally wait to harvest your carrots and your turnips and your radishes and your greens and so on. The root crops, which would contain your turnips, your carrots and your radishes, tend to be the easiest or most straightforward as to when to harvest. It's going to be a simple pull it out of the ground and eat the roots. But each one is going to vary a little bit differently and it's going to depend on how much nutrition it got over the growing period, how much sunlight, et cetera. But the day still harvest is going to be a general timeframe. After that point, if you think it's ready to harvest, a great technique with root crops is to kind of dig around a little bit at the very top of the soil to unearth the root underground. And that's going to show you how big it is. Now, some of the radishes may be an inch round. The carrots are probably going to be about the size of a quarter at the top of the carrot, maybe a little bit larger. And the turnips are typically between a golf ball and a tennis ball size. If you see the root around that general size, it's probably ready to harvest. So let's go ahead and pull up a couple of our turnips. Turnips can get, you know, a good amount bigger than that. Yeah, I mean, they can get quite a bit bigger than that, but those are some nice little turnip harvests. And of course, the greens are edible as well. I like to mix the greens in with other cooked veggies. They do have little prickles on them, so some people don't love them in salads. I don't mind them picked young, but when they get big, I tend to cook them, saute them up, cook them with some collard greens, all different good recipes. But typically the root is the portion that you're going to be using this crop primarily for. When you harvest turnips, a lot of people that are new to gardening or eating turnips without them being processed is the skin. Depending on the season and how long they were left in the ground, sometimes the outside can get a little bit woody. So if you peel it, just like a potato, I suppose you could say, and take that thicker outer skin off, that will remove a lot of the bitterness and toughness of the turnip. So if you really want, if you don't want toughness, harvest them when they're younger, you'll get a really nice crisp. You can actually eat them raw in salads when they're younger. We'll talk a little bit about other ways to cook these, including roasting them. So let's go ahead and pull up a couple of carrots. So just to pull up this one, what do you think about this little one? So not full grown by any means, but it's a nice healthy carrot. And a lot of times, carrots aren't difficult, but as far as appropriate weather, appropriate spacing, all of those things, soil depth, soil quality, there's a lot that goes into those perfect carrots that you see at the farmer's market or the grocery store. So don't be surprised if they're a little under size. If you're digging around at the top of the soil and it's not quite a quarter, not quite a quarter, but it's getting to be three, four weeks past when you planted them in the suggested day of harvest. If you get to that point, go ahead and harvest them, even if they're not the right size, because at that point, they tend to change flavor profile and get a little bit more woody. So follow your days of harvest as your primary guide when you're harvesting carrots. So here's our carrot bunch, obviously pretty small carrots. These, this bed just did not get enough sun. It only had about two hours a day, three hours a day, but all of these are edible and delicious and wonderful. And even these little dinky ones are carrots that you can eat and you can cook these up or you can eat them raw in salads. And of course the greens can be used for... I love Ipesto. I do a half and half with other various herbs and then I'll take the tops. They also can be composted. If you have chickens, chickens love them. Yes. So always find a use, never the trash. Never the trash. So yeah, there's a little carrot harvest. So basil is one of those iconic herbs and they take a little bit of pruning to keep healthy. If we don't prune them on a very regular basis, they are going to quickly go to flower and seed. Now Tulsi can handle the flowering and the seeding a little bit longer than most basals, but if you were to let your Italian basil or the Reuben basil or anything like that go to seed, the whole plant basically says, I just did my job and now I'm going to die. So if we want to continue harvesting them, we need to prune on a regular basis. And the nice thing about that is it also promotes more growth. So it's like the gift that keeps on giving. Yes. People are often timid about harvesting, but harvesting makes more food. The less you harvest, the slower the plants are to produce and the more they have to support. And so it's basically expending their energy on like 50 leaves, whereas, you know, if they only have 10 to take care of, then you get bigger production, more production overall. So consistent harvesting is key. Yeah. So with basil in particular, the stems of the basil can be either green or brown. And I'm going to be talking about how to prune and that only applies to green stems. If the stem has become brown and woody, don't use these techniques, get what you can from what's left and let it be. If you prune it down when the stems are brown, it's going to die. So with basil, you have branches. It's called leaf nodes. And so if we harvest by snipping, a lot of people will come through and they'll pull individual leaves. And that's fine, but that's not promoting that pruning so that you prevent flowering and that's not producing more growth. So instead, using scissors or pruning shears, you're going to want to come above a leaf node and snip off an entire portion of the plants. And it feels counterintuitive or counterproductive, but this is growing you more food. If you do not do this step, you're going to have issues. And just to show, this is where we had done that recently. And then you saw that it put out two new branches. Mm-hmm. So this, if we were to do it again to the two new branches that just formed, that produces two more. So then you have four and if those four get pruned again, you have eight. So you see that this is a productive, healthy way to go about it. And you can see this holy basil right here has been pruned quite a few times and has turned this one basil into a nice, bushy, productive basil. Yep, so with basil, especially out of the herbs, you're going to be pruning on a very regular basis, looking for the green stem versus the brown stem and harvesting entire pieces rather than individual leaves. Cilantro and dill on the other hand are going to be ones that you would prune individual leaves from as needed so that you have a sustained harvest over time. So what did you just do and what are you doing right now? So I am taking out, I'm looking down the stem to try to find like the oldest or lowest leaf node that will still branch out. And so by doing that, I'm harvesting the most that I'm able to, but I'm still allowing the plant to continue its branching growth pattern. So we just did a heavy harvest of this holy basil and now we will be able to dry this and have it as an herb to save as tea through the winter if you're in a colder place or just year round. Absolutely. So you can see, you can harvest quite a bit off of that plant. Now we are going to harvest some greens. So today we have arugula, kale, and mustard greens to harvest. So there's two different ways when you can harvest leafy greens. There's a technique that's called cut and come again, which basically means you were giving it a buzz cut and the plant will regrow from what is left behind. So let's go ahead and do that. For cut and come again harvest, you're literally just going to be harvesting the upward growth or the top growth, mature growth from the plant just like Robin's doing. The important part about cut and come again is that you don't go below that new growth. So whenever you're working with a plant, if you kind of tuck away the mature outer leaves, you're going to see the new baby leaves starting to form at the very center. At that center is that new growth. So as long as that is left intact, it will quickly regrow itself for you to cut again. And you can see the new growth that I've left here, just these small leaves that are coming out of the center and those will turn into the nice big leaves like this. So this technique is great for large harvests. If you need a large quantity or if you're in a hurry and you just want to get out there and get it. Yes, usually the cut and come again is what I do if I'm trying to harvest a lot. When I'm moving a little slower, I'm working with bigger leaves. That's when we're going to... Yep, you're going to be harvesting individual leaves one at a time. And so things like kale and mustard, not only are you harvesting the larger leaves, but they don't have the same growth pattern. The new growth is at the top. So if we were to cut those, they're gone. They're done and that's it. Yes, so we'll head out to the front and we will show you that. So we're here with the kale and I'm seeing ladybugs walking around on here, which are wonderful eating the aphids, helping us out with that very natural insect control. And here we have some of the Russian kales. We have white Russian and red Russian. This kale here is actually not from the free seed pack. This is a curly kale, which who knows, in some years that could be in there. That could change from year to year. And then this kale here, this is the dinosaur or the lasonado kale, which is in the pack, but this also was already growing here. So we're going to show you how to prune the kale and how to harvest the kale, which often is going hand in hand. And I just want to note that this is another area that I was gone from for about two weeks. So these actually are really in need of a heavy pruning and harvesting, which is perfect, because we're going to be able to show you that. So when you're working with kale, we're going to be thinking about this as the bottom up or the outside in, whichever makes more sense in your head, but we're not going to be using that cut and come again technique. We're going to be harvesting an individual leaf at a time. And that's so that you have a single plant producing for you for the entire summer or potentially even years in the form of the Lassenado kale. If you're in certain areas of the country, that can literally be a short lived two to three year kale tree. Yes, I do want to mention Lassenado kale is one of my absolute favorite plants. Like Elise said, it's almost like a kale tree. And I've seen them in what Southern California, Washington, Florida, where they are multi year lived. And they can get to be three, four feet tall, just such big production. Yeah, so when you're harvesting the kale, you want to start from the soil line, depending on how mature it is, and just follow it up. And when you hit the first few branches, you're going to simply be snapping those off. They come off nice and clean. They pull off really easy. This is one that's older, not going to be necessarily edible. But if we keep going up the plants, harvesting individual leaves at a time, you get to the edible stuff. And this is the stuff we're putting into our salads or smoothies or whatever. You want to prune or you can prune as much as you'd like, as long as you always have bare minimum three to five leaves left on the plant. You would never want to take more than that because it needs to photosynthesize to continue that growth and production for you. So this one here, this one needs a really, this one really needs a big pruning. It's got a lot of aphids on it. A lot of these leaves are pretty dying after two weeks of not harvesting. And so this is getting pruned back pretty heavily. And the thing with that is we may be tempted to leave it, but when a plant has a lot of defoliation, it's heavy pest pressure, leaving it can actually cause more issues. So a heavy prune every once in a while, especially if you were gone for a while, it's going to be pretty beneficial. So speaking of beneficial, we may as well show there's all sorts of ladybug, larva on here. So I wouldn't want to toss these into the compost necessarily cause I'd want to let these come through. What would you do in this scenario? Well, I would leave it at the base of the other plant so that it can compost in place. And this more than likely we'll have the time it needs to pupate and start feeding on it. And even with the aphids wanting to get them out of here, it's worth it to leave them with the ladybugs in here. Aphids are immobile. So they're not going to transfer themselves from one plant to another. If there are ants in the area, which is quite common, that's a different story. Okay. Cause they move them around in pharma. They will move them around in pharma. So here's the, you know, you wouldn't, when I first learned that, whoa, this is what turns into a ladybug. It's so easy to assume that that would be some sort of beetle that eats your plants or something. But ladybug larvae have quite a different look from the ladybug themselves. Everybody always thinks about the adult ladybugs, but the immature larval form, actually eats more aphids than their adult counterparts. Wow. Nice to know. All right. As much as we mentioned that some of these lacinato cales can live like multiple years, that's an exception. Most of the plants in the seed pack are annuals. Now we have perennials like oregano and lemon balm and chives, but most of these are annuals and they will die. And you are going to facilitate that death. You are going to work with them through that death, but you are not going to resist that death if you want to be successful in the garden, embracing that death is a part of growing, especially annuals. Once you get into the perennial world, which is something that I hope to help you get into more, then we're talking about fruit trees that can last more than a lifetime. But with these annuals, most of them don't last more than three, four, sometimes five, six, seven months, depending on where you are. Seasonality and working with nature is par for the course, and there's nothing we can do to shift that. So embracing it, like you said, identifying things that are in season year round, working with eating the weeds. If your annual garden is in a lull or hasn't started producing for you, there's always going to be something in spring that pops up early or is harvestable year round. Yes, and as Elise said, don't forget to eat the weeds because they can be just as abundant as what you're growing and just as nutritious.