For most crops in the Garden at 485 Elm, gardeners harvest whatever’s ready to eat. Greens, beans, peas, eggplants, peppers, summer squash, and herbs are harvest as we go.
A few crops we harvest all at once then divide by the number of gardener households for distribution. Any friends of the garden who join us for these harvests will go home with some of that food too. Those harvest-and-divide crops are potatoes, onions, garlic, brussels sprouts, and winter squash. There are also small shares “boutique” crops we grow just a little of, such as edamame, peanuts, and hull-less pumpkins we grow just for the seeds.
One gardener digs around each potato plant. The other gardener holds the potatoes by the leaves and eases them out of the ground. The leaves go in the garden waste windrow. The potatoes go in a wheelbarrow for sorting and dividing.This is how potatoes grow.Onions are similar to harvest: Pull them out by the leaves, but just one at a time. Gardeners remove the leaves from the onions. One way to store onions is hanging them by the leaves. Now that leek moths are a returning pest year after year, we cut the leaves to ensure that any leek moths who found their way into the plants don’t burrow down into the onion bulb, rendering it inedible.Onions being sorted into shares
A share is one container of potatoes and one pile of onions.
