How do I tell when each vegetable is ready to pick?

Days-to-maturity on a seed packet is a guide from a trial ground in a different climate. In a real garden the number moves by weeks with the weather and the season. What does not move is the physical evidence on the plant, and every crop has a sign worth knowing.

Step by step

1. Adopt the general rule first.With very few exceptions, home-grown vegetables are better slightly under-mature than over. Picking early keeps fruiting crops producing, keeps roots tender and keeps leaves sweet.
2. Fruiting crops: pick small and pick often.Courgettes at 10–15cm, beans when the pod snaps cleanly and no seed shapes show, peas when the pods are filled but still bright green, cucumbers at the size on the packet. Every mature fruit left on the plant slows or stops production.
3. Sweetcorn: silks brown, then the milk test.When the silks at the top of the cob have gone brown and dry, peel back a little husk and press a kernel with a thumbnail. Milky liquid means ready; clear watery means too early; thick and doughy means past it.
4. Potatoes: flowering for earlies, dead haulm for maincrop.Earlies are ready around flowering — scrape soil away from one plant and check the size. Maincrop is left until the foliage yellows and dies, then cut and left about two weeks for the skins to set.
5. Onions and garlic: the tops go over on their own.Onions when most of the row has flopped and yellowed. Garlic when about a third to a half of the leaves have yellowed. Never bend the tops over yourself.
6. Root crops: check the shoulder.Scrape soil from the top of one root and look at the diameter. Beetroot between golf ball and tennis ball; carrots at whatever size you want, earlier for sweetness; radish at three to five weeks and not a week later.
7. Brassicas: firmness, not size.A cabbage is ready when the heart feels solid under a squeeze. Cauliflower when the curd is full but still tight and smooth. Calabrese when the head is full but the individual buds are still closed and dark.
8. Squash and pumpkins: hard stem, hard skin, coloured ground spot.The three tests together. A thumbnail should not mark the skin, and the stem should be corky rather than green.
9. Leafy crops: pick outer leaves continuously.Chard, kale, perpetual spinach and lettuce all crop far longer if you take outer leaves rather than whole plants. Cut-and-come-again salad is cut at about 10cm, leaving 2–3cm to regrow.
10. Sacrifice one to learn.Pulling a single beetroot, scraping under one potato plant or peeling back one sweetcorn husk costs almost nothing and answers the question definitively. Guessing across a whole row does not.

Tips

• Pick in the morning where you can. Vegetables are at their most turgid and keep better than ones picked in the heat of the afternoon.
• Sweetcorn, peas and asparagus lose sugar within hours of picking. Cook them the day you pick them and the difference from shop produce is enormous.
• Keep a note of when each crop came ready in your garden. After two seasons your own notes beat any packet.
• A crop left too long is usually still edible in a different form — a marrow, a shelled bean, a soup — so treat it as a change of recipe rather than a loss.
• Cut with a knife or secateurs rather than tugging, on anything where pulling would disturb the roots of the plant or its neighbours.

Common mistakes

• Waiting for vegetables to reach the size seen in shops — Commercial produce is a different variety grown for size and uniformity. Home crops are usually better well before that point.
• Harvesting on the packet's days-to-maturity — That figure moves by weeks with weather, sowing date and site. It is a planning number, not a harvest instruction.
• Leaving one big courgette or bean pod on the plant — A maturing fruit signals that seed production has succeeded, and the plant slows or stops flowering.
• Picking everything at once because it is all ready — Most crops hold better in the ground or on the plant than in the fridge. Take what you will eat and leave the rest growing.

Questions people ask