How Long do Vegetables Take Before they are Ready to be Picked?

Question

Is there a Nifty Data Table out there that Tells Me When to Plant Certain Vegetables and How Long Till I can Pick them? I am Trying to Get myself a Garden Built in my Backyard and would love all the Information I can get.

Answer 1

Here's a guide for harvesting a variety of vegetables:  http://www.ehow.com/how_4406526_guide-ha...

Answer 2

The joy of home gardening is being able to vary your harvest dates.  For example, if you like smaller green beans, you pick them when smaller.  If you like the bean inside, you wait until the bean inside the pod is fully developed.  By then the pod would be tough and inedible, but the beans inside would be tasty.

Potatoes you can harvest when still quite small or let them develop to a larger size.  

Some products keep producing the more your harvest, lettuce for example or peppers.  Tomatoes vary by the type you plant.  Determinate type ripen at once whereas the Indeterminate ripen over a far longer period.  

Other veggies need specific time to ripen to develop their flavor, melons and squash for example.

So the numbers you see listed on seed packages and catalogs are just general as to when the plant will be ready to first harvest after it is initially set into the ground or emerges above the soil from germination.  

Answer 3

In the Midwest you have to wait till after the last frost then you can plant corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, muskmelons, radishes, turnips, pumpkins, squash, cabbages etc.. It's getting late in the season but you could still plant radish, turnips etc.. You pick the tomatoes when they get red. You can pick corn about 3 weeks after it starts silking. You can pick beans when they look big enough for you. Most of it you will be able to tell just by looking at it.