General Tower Garden Guidelines: How (and When) to Harvest
Knowing how and when to harvest your Tower Garden crops will become easier as you get more experienced with growing. It’s important to note that the timing in which certain crops are harvested can dramatically impact the taste and texture of the plant. To make things easy, we developed a rough guide for harvesting certain crops to help you get it right each time.
Determining when and how to harvest your Tower Garden yields will depend largely on the crop. While some crops, like baby greens, will be ready for harvest in a couple of weeks, larger crops, like cucumbers, can take up to a couple of months before they can be picked.
Below are a few tips to ensure your harvests go smoothly.
Gathering Gorgeous Greens
Most greens — such as lettuce, kale, collards and others — allow for two harvesting methods, so you may always have fresh ingredients on hand for salads and other healthy dishes.
- Whole plant. Remove the entire plant and net pot from your Tower Garden or cut all the leaves off at 2-3cm from the base of the plant.
- Cut harvest. This technique keeps the plant alive and encourages continued production. When there are plenty of mature leaves present:
- Harvest only a few leaves at a time, from the bottom of the plant upward.
- Allow 2-3 leaves to remain so the plant may keep growing.
- Repeat every 2-3 days until the plant bolts or begins flowering.
- After bolting, replace the plant with a fresh seedling.
Picking Perfect Produce
While tomatoes, squash, peppers and other fruit-bearing plants may be quite different, a few harvesting best practices apply to all. Do the following to improve your chances of record yields:
- Harvest frequently to promote continued flowering and production.
- When harvesting, use a clean knife or shears to avoid injuring the plant.
Harvesting Healthy Herbs
It seems a little counter intuitive, but typically the more herbs you harvest, the more you will grow. And there’s no such thing as too many herbs! Here are a few guidelines to remember when harvesting herbs:
- Harvest frequently to encourage healthy, bushy growth.
- Harvest no more than 1/3 of the plant at a time.
- Once the plant bolts (or starts to flower), replace it with a fresh seedling.
Saving Seeds
Harvesting seeds from your plants may not be something you’ve considered. But it’s a great way to keep growing your favourite crops for free! The following seed-saving steps will apply to most plants.
- After flowering or fruiting, collect seeds from open-pollinated plant varieties.
- Wash and dry seeds.
- Store seeds in an airtight container, and place somewhere cool, dry and dark.
Share Your Harvests
We love seeing the amazing harvests picked by our Tower Garden community. Don’t forget to share your fresh pickings with our official Instagram and Facebook pages. Happy harvesting!
Click here to download a PDF of the How (and When) to Harvest guide.
