WITH such a varied harvest, now is the best point on the calendar in the fruit and veg garden. But what you the consumer want and what the plants need isn’t always the same thing. We pick peaches and plums when fully ripe, exactly as a tree desires, but should harvest beans and courgettes much earlier than suits the plants. Gardeners value taste and flavour, while plants need to reproduce successfully.
We always play by a plant’s rules when picking fruit. Like blackbirds, we want strawberries to be as sweet and juicy as possible, but our feathered friends are more impatient than us.
As with most fruits, strawberries rely on birds and mammals to disperse their seed as far as possible from the parent. There’s always a build-up of viruses and other pathogens round any plant, so a young one stands a much better chance in fresh ground.
Strawberries start green, hard and bitter, but as the seeds ripen, the fruit becomes more appealing. Cells in the fruit break down, making the fruit deliciously juicy.
Plants use colour to advertise their wares, with dark red and black usually the main inducements. I guess birds must classify blueberries as black, given their taste for mine. At least white is below their radar, so I can grow white strawberries in a potager bed without an unsightly netted shroud.
Many strategies are used to recruit creatures to disperse seed. With larger seed, birds and mammals often claim their fruity reward then spit out the seed or pass it through their gut. This process can even be timed. The hapless seed carrier may have to quickly get rid of it in a bout of diarrhoea, or through leisurely constipation. The seed of Australian mistletoe is so sticky that, after eating the berry, a bird needs to wipe its backside against a branch of the tree species the mistletoe wants to use for a host.
And back to edibles. Chilli peppers also choose who will spread their seed. Mammals find the chemical that produces the heat in the pepper, capsaicin, unpalatable, but birds aren’t affected by it, so eat the fruits and carry away the seeds.
Plants can also rely on the poor memory of seed carriers, particularly when they produce larger seeds. To my dismay, mice have a taste for peas. They’ll readily strip low-growing pods and leave them much nibbled and empty. Squirrels do the same with nuts. But, because they either die or forget where they’ve hidden their booty, some of the stored seed will survive to germinate.
Gardeners themselves are poor are spreading seed. They often deliberately pick vegetables long before the seed has ripened, or sometimes even formed. Take sugar peas and runner beans, where the pod is what we’re usually after. A bean freak, I like the beans as well as the pods, so have a runner bean stand for each. And, in my book, broad beans should be tiny and dark green. Large, floury specimens are an affront to any palate.
This kind of premature harvesting can encourage some vegetables to produce a larger, tastier crop of smaller vegetables. By cutting a broccoli head, you encourage the plant to produce equally succulent side shoots. The main stem of any plant enjoys apical dominance, a technique by which it releases hormones that inhibit the growth of side shoots. By removing the dominant leader, you encourage lateral growth.
Courgettes and squashes can also be tricked into delivering a tastier crop. There’s evidence that by cutting courgettes when 8-9cm long, you encourage the plant to keep on growing. This removal stimulates extra leaf growth and the female flowers that become new fruits. If you simply let a marrow swell, you’ll have fewer leaves and therefore fewer courgettes. Small is beautiful.
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