Have you ever found yourself intimidated by fashion magazines filled with beautiful celebrities and models who are then photoshopped to remove every little imperfection?
Believe it or not, vegetables can be portrayed the same way in magazines and online. Articles filled with photographs of perfectly-sized vegetables without a speck of dirt on them can be intimidating to the average vegetable gardener.
Well, I’m here to tell you the truth and reveal two dirty secrets of vegetable gardening with some assistance from my little helper.
My granddaughter, Lily, was excited to help me harvest the last of my cool season crops.
So we ventured out into the garden and pulled out carrots and garlic. Then we harvested the last head of broccoli and picked the first of the blackberries from the bushes and cut the parsley.
This is what our harvest looked like.
I’ll admit that it looks rather dirty and messy and certainly not something you would see in a magazine.
This leads me to reveal the first ‘secret’ about vegetable gardening.
“It’s dirty.”
Think about it – vegetables grow in the dirt. They don’t come out clean. In fact, it can take a while to clean the dirt away.
Lily was excited to help me clean the vegetables, so she would fill her ‘My Little Pony’ cup over and over and pour them over the carrots.
In fact, freshly harvested vegetables leave dirt behind on counters, floors too.
And those shiny, clean garden tools and spotless gloves?
They don’t exist in a real garden.
Okay, so we’ve covered the fact that vegetable garden is a dirty hobby – it’s supposed to be.
Now, here is the second dirty secret of vegetable gardening…
“Not all the vegetables are the same size and come out unblemished.”
Here are four carrots that I harvested from the same garden. As you can see, they are all different sizes.
The tiny ones, came from an area where I accidentally dropped a small pile of seeds. The large one was a result of an area in the garden that received too much water and the carrot was so big that it broke off as I attempted to pull it out.
Of course, any decent photo would display only the ‘normal-sized’ carrots – but that is not necessarily the truth of what a real garden harvest would look like.
Here is another example. Our crop of garlic was bountiful. But, notice that there are not all a uniform size.
While the majority of the garlic harvest was made up of normal-sized garlic heads – there were some very small and some giant heads.
But of course, that is not what you see when people typically show off their garden harvest – especially when they are to be photographed.
– First, only the most attractive vegetables are selected – those that are unblemished and a uniform size.
– Second, all the dirt is cleaned off.
– And finally, the decorative dish towels come out for an attractive background.
I have several decorative dish towels that have never seen a dish.
I use them when I photograph vegetables, herbs, etc.
Here is my ‘perfect’ garlic harvest. What is interesting is what you DON’T see.
All of them are nicely shaped, roughly the same size and most of the dirt was cleaned off.
Most definitely NOT what they looked like when I brought them in from the garden.
A ‘real’ vegetable harvest is not ‘photoshopped’ and consists of dirty vegetables, some with blemishes and in all sizes and shapes.
So, when you harvest vegetables from your garden, don’t worry about perfect-looking vegetables. Remember, it’s the taste that matters!
