Eating fresh from the garden
Story by Rick Snyder, Ph.D.
Now that spring is in full swing and summer is knocking on the door, we are ready to harvest some fresh vegetables from our gardens.
If you have a perennial planting of asparagus, you would have started picking in March and April. But for everybody else, let’s talk about what you can expect during a typical harvest season in Mississippi.
In the chart below, you can see when each vegetable should be available from first to final harvest. Some vegetables can be grown in the spring and then planted again for a fall harvest. Note: variations in weather – temperature, rain, etc. – can cause harvests to be earlier or later. Very warm spring or summer weather will definitely speed up the growth of your garden plants.
A few additional things I’d like to point out. You can get much earlier harvests of cold-tolerant vegetables if you plant them a little earlier. These include English peas, sweet corn, and Irish potatoes.
Pumpkins can be harvested later than October 1. It’s just that not too many people want them after Halloween!
Although the harvest window for sweetpotatoes is somewhat limited, they are available year round due to cool storage on the farm. Other vegetables that are available all year, or nearly all year, are honey, pecans, and greenhouse tomatoes and lettuce.
For more information on home vegetable gardening, be sure to read the Garden Tabloid. You can find it online at here.
Happy Gardening!
