Edible Garden: Tips for fruit and vegetables

Red kumara. Photo / Richard Robinson

It's sometimes hard to know when to dig up your root crops or when to pick fruit. Here's a guide.

Dig up potatoes and onions when the plants die down. If you want to hurry onions along, after the bulb has formed, dig carefully around them, loosening some roots. This will stop top growth and quicken maturity. Dry the crop carefully before storing in a cool dark place. Never store any crop that is damp or damaged.

Potatoes, onions and kumara should only be harvested when the weather is fine. With kumara it isn't easy to know whether they are ripe. They are perennials and keep on growing. So you have to check the skin is firm. When you've dug them up leave them piled on top of the soil in the sun for a week to harden. And hope it doesn't rain.

With pumpkins and melons wait until the skin is hard and the stem dry. Make sure the skin is undamaged. Fungal infections can enter if there is a hole or scratch. When you pick them, leave about 5cm of stalk on the pumpkin.

Never pick rock-hard apples for storage. But do pick pears when they are still hard and green but easy to pull off the tree. I ripen three or four at a time, on the windowsill. This applies to tomatoes too. Pick them when they are just changing colour and finish off the ripening process inside. And the smell of ripening pears and tomatoes in the home is one of the joys of this time of year.