After a long winter, the thrill of spring can hit with a sense of limitless possibilities. Soon, the tasks start piling up, and our ambitions can easily add up to overwhelm us. With so much life bursting out from every corner, sometimes it’s all we can do to deal with what’s urgently in front of us.

Without establishing healthy habits and implementing essential tech in advance, harvest time can become a bottleneck for cultivators. Outdoor growers, especially, don’t always have the leisure to bring in their crops when and how they would prefer —nature has its ways of imposing deadlines. Making decisions early and putting the essential technology in place at each growing stage helps growers achieve high-quality and abundant yields.

Early Season: Selection, Number, and Size of Plants

To improve predictability, consider the choice of genetics, dedication of space, and plant architecture.

Gene Genie: What’s your wish?

At the turn of the 20th century, some social activists advocated for “fewer, better children.” They argued that parents should have more conscious, empowered choices about their reproductive proliferation so they could concentrate their efforts on providing good lives for those under their care, not engineering toward one particular, supposedly superior “type.”

It’s an incredible gift to have access to seeds and plant nurseries. Folks work hard behind the scenes to develop and raise varieties that will suit each climate, taste, and growing style.

When it comes to harvest planning, the space-use difference between short and bushy versus long and lanky types, optimal planting dates, and days to maturity are key considerations.

There are two main timing options. Simultaneous sowing combined with a choice of varieties with different finishing windows (such as short-, medium-, and late-season potatoes) also allows for harvesting in stages, providing more time and space to process your crop.

On the flip side, making sure your plants all ripen within a few days of one another can simplify processing by stacking all the associated tasks together — you cut down all the plants, remove the unwanted parts, clean them all, etc. This is better if you only want to set up for each job once and when you know you will have plenty of time, labor energy, and space to handle the whole harvest when the time is right.

When you’re cultivating fewer, better plants, it’s also about making selections well-suited to your goals. You want to find your best option for phytochemical profile (flavor, nutrient, and/or medicinal effect) and your ultimate post-harvest plans (a summer of nonstop cherry tomatoes vs. a year’s worth of jarred sauce).

Essential tech:

• Biotech — high-quality starting materials (seeds/seedlings) and microbial inoculants
• Rooting tech — rooting hormones/solutions, substrate/rooting blocks
• Temperature management tech — heating mats, humidity domes, and, in some cases, cold frames and/or cloches to foster and protect vital young transplants.

Number, Size, and Shape

It can be tempting to grow everything, everywhere, all at once. Don’t let me stop you — I love a wild, diverse, integrated garden. There’s no hard and fast rule for success regarding how close plants can be to one another in a mixed bed. I’ve been very lucky to have big kale plants provide frost protection for little bushes (evidenced by the lack of anthocyanin coloration in the sheltered ones). I’ve also had plants suffer the consequences of too much shading and not enough airflow — it’s always a balance.

In both scenarios, I had the opportunity to play it a little fast and loose with those individuals because they were volunteers and spares, tucked into whatever space was available and mostly left to their own devices. I had some bigger, segregated plants under cultivation to depend on for my main harvest. This is the “fewer but better” group; “better,” in this case, means “better attended to by the human cultivator.”

Remember that bigger, higher-quality root systems typically support bigger, higher-quality above-ground parts of plants. Prepare the desired number of containers (or space in dedicated raised beds or garden rows) with high-quality soil. Be mindful of their location, taking into account factors such as sunlight, wind, drainage, and ease of watering. Tidiness and ease of accessibility encourage frequent visits, making regular observation more pleasant and increasing the likelihood that you’ll discover any problems sooner rather than later.

Shaping your plants with intentional leaf and branch removal early will direct your plant to use its energy for growing more flowering sites in a concentrated space. At season end, you’ll have fewer sticks and stems and more of what you aim to consume.

Robust producers need sturdy, dependable support systems. A combination of fencing or netting and strong, well-anchored posts will save heartache and improve overall yield weight. By preventing collapses and stalk/limb breakage, both of which can also lead to mould and pest damage, ripening plants can safely pack on mass.

Essential Tech:

• Architectural tech — reliable, right-sized containers; good supports; clean and sharp tools for trimming; and tie-downs for spreading branches to open canopies to sunlight and encourage horizontal growth.

Active Growth Period: Staying Healthy

Regardless of what you’re cultivating, a relatively low-stress life helps produce more consistent and abundant yields. Integrated pest management (IPM) on a schedule favors prevention over reaction.

Introduce beneficial microbes and re-up their numbers as part of your transplanting and feeding routine. These growth-promoting bacteria and fungi integrate into your plants’ natural immunity and nutrient-absorption capacity. Through a complex system of inter-species communication, their presence sparks natural processes that influence both the quality and quantity of harvests.

Visualize the timing of IPM applications and how they line up with the stages of your garden’s development, noting important dates like transplanting, training/trellising, and transitions between plant growth stages.

In parallel, chart the weeks you expect to be feeding for explosive vegetative youth, through the stretch and changing nutritional demands of the ‘teens’ into flowering and fruit-set at maturity in adulthood. This way, you can confidently anticipate changes in pest pressures — some critters are only dangerous while plants are still small, and others are especially damaging to flowers, fruits, or developing seeds.

Cleaning yourself, your clothes, your tools, and your workspaces is also worth scheduling. This is a sub-category of IPM and a reminder to practice good self-care. It’s a real bummer to catch a summer cold (or worse) because you got caught in the rain and didn’t have a spare cozy sweater to put on or enough hot water ready for a good shower. The same thing goes for taking spores and soil-dwelling pests on ride-a-longs because you didn’t have a space-dedicated change of footwear or boot-cleaning station.

When plants are healthier during the active growing season, less time will be needed at harvest to inspect for and remove damaged parts.

Essential tech:

• Planning tech — a calendar, spreadsheet or app so you can glance to the next week or month and be prepared for upcoming tasks.
• IPM-related tech — sprayers/misters, ingredients for the sprays you’re putting in them, magnifying glasses or microscopes, fresh sticky traps, and bags or bins to collect and remove unwanted materials to a safe place for remediation/destruction.
• Feeding-related tech — nutrients, measuring spoons or cups, mixing containers, stir sticks, and watering cans or irrigation systems for fertigation; spreaders, shovels, or hand tools if topdressing.
• Cleanliness-related tech — sanitisers, detergents, rags, buckets, brushes, rubber or nitrile gloves…you get the idea.

The Finish Line: Harvest, Processing, Storage

When it comes to harvest goals, it’s crucial to have a good idea of how much you will be able to handle when the time comes for processing. Dream big, so everything else is a welcome and manageable bonus if you meet your minimum targets. Essential tech will help meet those goals!

As soon as something is picked from the garden, it’s starting to break down. The plant’s immune defenses and the community of beneficials surrounding it are, for the most part, no longer in play. Over the years, I’ve seen too much good produce go to waste due to under-preparedness at the critical moment when fresh harvests need to be processed.

Assemble a kit or create gear checklists for various types of harvests and their corresponding processing methods. Remember to include enough collection containers to minimize squashing and allow some airflow to slow down decay.

Unsuspecting essential tech? A deep freezer can be a lifesaver for unexpected abundance; if you don’t have one, ask around and barter for some reserved subzero storage space. In advance, make arrangements within your network for ‘short-notice’ work parties. You might do this as early as pre-germination: “I’ll grow extra for you if you’ll commit to helping me when it’s ripe.”

Air and people moving between active growing and processing areas can easily spread microbes, often due to disturbed soil. To control quality, have a place prepared for safely staging freshly picked material while you clean or change clothes and tools. To reduce cross-contamination, it is ideally located somewhere you can approach from two different directions: one from the (dirty) garden and the other from the (clean) house or processing area.

Essential tech:

• Water-reduction tech — fans, dehumidifiers, and dehydrators for quick and even evaporation
• Processing Tech — whichever specific equipment you use for cutting, extracting, infusing, etc.
• Storage tech — containers (e.g. canning jars, vacuum-sealing bags, bins, lightproof cabinets), desiccant/humidity regulating packets

Enjoying the Fruits – Give Yourself a Star!

When you’ve planned for harvest throughout the grow and produced aplenty, it’s a great feeling. Allow yourself to celebrate!

Of course, all the preparation in the world can only go so far; sometimes, we yield little more than hard lessons and experiential data to inform future decisions. Either way, using good and essential tech throughout the season has hopefully led to a journey that was less fraught with anxiety for both you and your plants.