Doing This Tricks Plants to NEVER Stop Fruiting

What's going on growers? It's James Figgioni coming to you live from Jersey. It's likely that you are directly producing your own harvests and you might not even know it. Today I'm going to show you a simple yet effective way to double your harvests by doing one basic thing. Let's go! Have you ever heard that saying, less is more? It's a cool concept and it applies to a lot of scenarios, even ones in the garden. But the other side of that would be to say, more is more. And that accurately describes the powerful technique I'm sharing with you. People ask me, James, how do you get such massive harvests of cucumbers and squash? I've seen you go out there and grab big bowls full of cucumbers and then it seems like the next day you're out there again grabbing a whole basket full of cucumbers. My initial response would be that I do the simple things right and grow young healthy plants that develop into productive plants. But just having healthy plants isn't enough. You need to go out there, be hands on, and literally trick your plants to produce more. If you want more fruit, you need to force the plants to produce more fruit. You're probably thinking, he's talking about top dressing with a fertilizer when the plants head into production. Well, that is a good idea, but that's not what I'm getting at. This technique of increasing a plant's yield has nothing to do with adding. In fact, it has to do with taking away. Right here, we have a healthy summer squash plant. You'll notice, when I grow them, I plant them at the edge of my bed-go-raise bed. This way they can grow out the side of it and then don't take up a lot of space. As you move in, you'll notice that this plant has some flowers on it and a few squash already growing. If I allow this summer squash to continue to ripen, it will get bigger and bigger. And you might be thinking, nice, bigger fruit means a bigger harvest. Well, you need to be careful here, because if we allow this to continue to mature, then the seed inside of it will start to mature and it will start to try to ripen, and this is not what we want. The goal of a summer squash plant, a cucumber plant, a green bean plant, isn't to produce a lot of fruit. The main goal is to produce viable seed that can then drop to the ground and then grow into offspring. The main focus for these plants is to create the next generation of plants. Most plants go through three stages of growth. First is what's known as the vegetative state. Here, they're focused on growing leaves and just getting larger as a plant. Then, as the plant continues to grow up, it transitions into what's known as the fruiting stage. Here, the plant is focused on producing flowers and producing fruit. If we allow that fruit to ripen, then the plant will shift into what's known as the seed ripening stage. The thing is, if we allow the plant to shift into that seed ripening stage, then it can't revert back to the fruiting stage. So, the plant is going to essentially not produce any more flowers or any more fruit. So, we have essentially forced our plant to stop producing fruit. Our goal as backyard gardeners isn't to ripen seed. Our goal is to get as big a harvest as possible. So, what we want to do to increase our harvest is we want to trick our plants to produce more. We want to trick our plants to remain in the fruiting and flowering stage as long as possible. The simple way we do this is we go out and we pick the fruit before it starts ripening the seed. For instance, when it comes to cucumbers, if we allow even one cucumber to over ripen on the vine, then the whole vine will quit producing. When that cucumber starts to get larger, then the seed inside of it starts to get larger too. And if we leave it on the vine too long, then the plant will say to itself, hey, that's a good fruit. We should actually focus on ripening that fruit. Then the plant will shift into a completely different stage of growth where it's focused on ripening that fruit. It will produce no more flowers and that means no more fruit. We've essentially forced our cucumber to stop producing fruit. This concept applies to many plants, mostly fruiting ones, but there are some others as well that we'll get into. Like I mentioned, it works for cucumbers and it works for squash. It also works for bush beans, especially the dragon tongue bean, which is my favorite variety of bean. Absolutely delicious. I can never eat enough of them. Tuck love the dragon tongue bean so much as well. What I like to do to make sure I get the most out of my bean plants is once I see them start to flower, you can see we've got a nice dragon tongue bean in here. Look, you can see the flowers here. Once I see it start to flower and the young fruit starting to form, I will come out and grab some of that fruit, like you see right here. We'll grab them even when they're young. The cool thing about grabbing fruit like this when it's young is usually when it's young, it's more tender, more sweet, and more juicy. The same thing goes for cucumbers and especially summer squash. When it comes to summer squash, you can start to pick them once the flower on the backside falls off. Like this one right here, even at this stage, it's a good idea to pick it. I'm just going to take my scissors and I'm just going to cut it off on the back right here. If we harvest this right now, then our squash will be smaller when we harvest, but our overall harvest will be larger because the plant will continue to keep fruiting. Also, when you allow the squash to get large, the outside gets thicker and harder, the inside, the flesh, dries out more, and the seed gets larger, which makes them worse for eating. But when we come out and harvest the squash when they're young, we'll increase our harvest because the more you pick, the more you get. So it's always good to go out there early and often and get picking. We've got a little bee in here working for us in this squash flower, pollinating for us. Thanks, buddy. This guy is covered in pollen, though. Look at him on his way out. I feel like he's so heavy from all that pollen. Keep working hard in the garden, buddy. And he's moving up. He's on his way out. So you don't have to grab the squash when they're that tiny like the one that I just showed you. This right here is a perfect time to grab your squash and a perfect size, especially if you want to slice it up and saute it or something. So this is like the perfect size to grab your squash. This one is small. You can grab them at this stage, too. They're delicious at this stage because they're so tender and so sweet. But this is fine, too. You just don't want the squash to start getting so large that it starts ripening the seed on the inside. Then it will stop producing more flowers. When you come into this squash plant, you'll notice we didn't get it too late. So there's flowers and mini squash here. And then they'll continue to have more squash that are forming. So we need to just make sure that we're not allowing the squash to get so large that it starts ripening the seed. You don't have to grab them when they're tiny. This is a fantastic size to grab them. This same concept applies to peas as well. If we go out there and grab our peas when they're small before they start to swell, then that will trick the plant to continue to produce more flowers so it can produce more peas and then hopefully create viable seed in the future. So going out there, the more we pick, the more we get. There will come a point, though, when the peas stop producing, though, simply based on the heat because peas, they hate the heat. But if we go out there and pick early and often, we could extend our pea harvest until they can't tolerate the heat anymore. Right here, you'll notice this plant has kind of given up because the heat came and we got as many harvests from it as we could. And we picked it early and often to try to extend that harvest. But when it came down to it, you can't do anything for the heat because the peas are a spring crop. They're not a summer crop. Believe it or not, basil falls into this group of plants that we could trick to produce more for us. You might be thinking, James, basil doesn't produce fruit. We're growing that just for the leaves. And I would say you're absolutely right. But if we're growing it just for the leaves, is there a way to extend the length of time that the basil plant focuses on growing leaves? Essentially, is there a way to trick the plant to stay in the vegetative state instead of transitioning into the flowering state? Fortunately for us, there is. And it goes back to picking early and often. When it comes to your basil plant, once you see it starting to flower, what you want to do is you want to come out and remove the top where it's flowering. So it's almost starting to flower right here. We'll take this top. We'll prune it off right there. What that does is it forces the plant to go back to the vegetative state. And right below where I ripped it off, these two nodes will grow into two new tops right there for our basil plant. So essentially, we're growing the basil for the leaves. When we take the tops off when it's flowering, we force that plant to go back to the vegetative state so the basil plant can produce more leaves for us. So actually, by taking away from the plant, it allows it to give us more back. It might seem counterintuitive at first, but when you think about it for a minute, it really makes sense. Another plant this kind of applies to are peppers. Especially early in the season, we want to go out there and pick the first fruits before they fully ripen. If we allow the pepper plant to produce and form peppers and ripen them when they start to turn like red or yellow, then that will slow the plant down. But if we go out there and grab them when they're still green the first round, then the plant will be like, oh, oh no, I gotta, I gotta produce more flowers to produce more peppers. So essentially, when we go out there and pick them when they're still young, we'll get a larger harvest overall because we're like, again, tricking the peppers to produce more. It might not be what they want, but it's definitely what we want. It's important to note that this does not apply to all plants. If you use this technique on your winter squash, you will not be a happy gardener. This concept, it applies to plants that we can eat before the fruit and before the plants are fully ripe. So some of those plants are things like our summer squash, including zucchini, which are absolutely delicious when they're young. Same goes for cucumbers and peppers and eggplant and okra and peas, bush beans, even some of our herbs like cilantro and also basil. On the other hand, fruits like winter squash need to fully ripen on the vine before you harvest them. If you pick them too early, then you will ruin the fruit. The same goes for watermelon, cantaloupe, pumpkins, gourds, and more. For some plants, like tomatoes, this concept doesn't apply at all, especially the indeterminate varieties, because whether or not you pick the fruit or you don't pick the fruit, the indeterminate tomatoes will just continue to produce more flowers and continue to produce up into a frost or some kind of disease kills them. The important thing is you know the fruits that you need to pick more in order to get more from them. This way you don't reduce your whole harvest. I thought it was a good idea to go into detail to explain to you exactly what's happening. This way, realistically, you won't need to like remember a whole list of plants this works for. Instead, you understand how and why this technique works. Then you could go out and use this technique wherever you think it properly applies in your garden. That's today's video growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. I hope you truly got some value out of this video. And I hope that you apply this technique into your garden because it absolutely works. It's such a simple way to increase your harvest. And that's why I love gardening and why I love making these videos because sometimes it's just like a little tweak you need. I heard someone talk about how sometimes you feel like, you know, success is so far away and that you have to do so many more things in order to, you know, in order to get a big harvest or in order for things to go well. But realistically, you might just be one little tweak away or one little alteration to really unlocking that bigger harvest. So oftentimes it might seem like you're further away from the actual goal than you are. But making those small incremental changes and tweaks can just change everything. So don't give up. Stick with it. Try out some of these ideas in the garden. And I promise you if you follow what I shared in here, it will significantly help your harvest. You won't be having to do any extra work of like adding more fertilizer or, you know, even something, I don't know, watering more. That's not necessary for this technique. All you need to do is to understand which crops you need to pick more of and then get out there and pick them before they start ripening the seed. That's basically it. I wanted to mention that we just recently dropped a homestead update and you guys gotta check that out if you haven't. I think that might be one of my favorite videos that I've ever made because it shows such growth and such, you know, progress. And I was able to just, with the help of a good excavator and stuff, to just completely change a landscape and to just make it more efficient. I think it was huge and I think it was one of my favorite videos that I ever made. So I'd love if you guys went and checked that one out. I also wanted to mention in this video, you're noticing we've got a new merch for rocking. We got the Let It Grow with that tomato. It starts as a seed, it sprouts, it grows through that vegetative state, right, right, and then it gets to that fruiting stage. Looks beautiful. Kind of a little play on the Let It Be by the Beatles, but that's how you gotta be in the garden sometimes. Sometimes you do need to get out there, you need to be hands-on, you need to make sure you're picking all that fruit. And then sometimes you just need to chill back and just let it grow. I wanted to also send a thank you to one of our new channel members, Tricia Downing. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. I also wanted to mention that there's been an increase in the superchats on the channel. People are just donating to the channel and, I mean, I don't even know what to say for that. Thank you and I appreciate the kindness. I appreciate, you know, how generous a lot of you are. To be me, just an idiot, hopping around in the garden, jumping around, yelling stuff at the camera, and then sometimes giving a little bit of good advice, the fact that you guys truly value that and that you're willing to reciprocate that and give back, that means the world to me. And I'm just very thankful for how generous a lot of you are that are a part of this whole team. That also leads me to mention that you guys gotta check out the community over at teamgrow.us, where we have well over 2,000 members. We're all pretty insane about gardening. That's our thing. We're super invested into it, but we're sharing everything that we've learned with one another. This way, we can come together as the team grow and truly grow a better future together. I had an absolute blast out here. These videos I love making. Different from the last video I made, the homestead video, it was 101 degrees out there. I was sweating before we even started. Today, it's cool. We've got a little bit of cloud cover, a nice breeze to it. So it's been a blast making this video. I had a lot of fun doing it. If you guys enjoyed it, make sure to hit the subscribe button. Make sure you share this with your friends and make sure you slam that like button because all the engagement you put down in the comments and every engagement you make on this video, it helps the channel. It helps this reach other people who want to grow some of their own food. So you truly are a part of this whole entire team. We'll catch you guys in another one real soon. We out. There's something really cool right above me. There's a nest right here. I don't want to bother it because it looks like it's a robin. It's probably sitting on some eggs. But it's really cool to be able to create the environment that's a paradise for all living things.