After the hard but satisfying work of gardening – experience the pleasure of eating your own fruit and vegetables.  When do you harvest your crop and what can you do if it ripens all at once?  Be prepared!  This section offers harvesting information, simple seasonal recipes and tips about how to preserve an abundant harvest or donate it to others.

Harvesting

• Fruit Harvesting Chart
• Herb Harvesting Chart
• Vegetable Harvesting Chart
• Vegetable Harvest and Storage

Harvesting Videos

Join local gardening expert Wendy Krupnick as she shows you how to harvest vegetables from your garden.  Special thanks to Russian River TV for video production.

Cooking from the Garden

Really Growing What You Eat

Seasonal recipes and cooking for healing...coming soon!

Preserving

• National Center for Home Food Preservation
  Includes information about drying, canning, freezing, and fermentation.
• Wild Fermentation  Information about fermenting food including pickling.

Gleaning: Collecting or Donating Excess Produce

If you have more fruits or vegetables than you can harvest, eat or give away, please consider contacting a local gleaning group. They will come to your garden or orchard, pick whatever you would like to donate and take it to a local food pantry or soup kitchen to feed to others in our community who might be hungry or have limited access to healthy food.

Do you have a fruit or nut tree in your neighborhood that doesn't get harvested?  Consider asking your neighbor if you can help them pick the produce and share it with the families in your neighborhood.  Or ask them to contact a gleaning organization.  Always ask first, since the owner may have plans to use their produce.

• Gleaning organizations in Sonoma County
• Food Banks and Pantries That Accept Donated Produce