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The key to keeping pears is to pick them when they are fully plump and well on the way to turning from raw green to a more mellow yellow. Let them ripen on the tree and they'll get gritty or rot from the inside out. Store in cool humidity just like apples. Before trying to eat them, let them ripen at cool room temperature till soft and fragrant.

Fresh Greens

Fresh beet or parsnip greens are delicious when young, even when growing from a second-year root. Try growing some in January. In a cool place, keep a good feed of stored roots in a paper bag with an old apple for a week. Before cooking, cut off the stems with a little extra root. Trim beet tops to a poker-chip-sized circle. Plant the eager-to-grow tops in 6" of pure compost under lights, if you have them, in a sunny window if you don't. Keep moist, but not soggy. Expect the leaves to be leggy. They'll make a good side dish in a few weeks, and the price is right.

GROWING

To most gardeners, when a second-year biennial or an annual plant that we eat in its first-year vegetative growth stage bolts and begins going to seed, it is lost. For sure, once a radish or kohlrabi top begins to get spiky, or a lettuce or spinach plant begins pushing a central spear up through its initial rosette of leaves, the once-edible portions become woody and bitter. But if they're allowed to grow and flower, you'll have the easiest-to-preserve edible of all: seeds. Non-hybrid seed can be planted next year; for that, don't eat, but let go the fastest-growing, plumpest radishes, kohlrabi, or lettuce. Seed of less choice individual plants can be saved, dry stored, and used to grow sprouts at home.

Lettuce seed is so tiny, it's hard to keep it from slipping through a harvest net. The sprouts are minuscule as well, but make a spicy garnish. Spinach seed can prove hard to sprout. But radish and kohlrabi seed are right-sized, easy to harvest and to sprout, and their tangy flavor adds zest to sprouting mixtures based on bland alfalfa or clover seed.

A recent health food discovery is that broccoli seed sprouts are edible. We've all heard about the health benefits of broccoli, cauliflower, and other members of the cabbage family. It appears that the anti-cancer and other beneficial properties of the plants are multiplied in their seed.

So, when your Green Comet or Deco broccoli gets ahead of you and erupts with umbrellas of fragrant little yellow blossoms, don't trim them off. Let 'em grow and make seed—which they will, quicker than you can imagine.

Harvest as soon as a little seed falls off in your hand with a gentle tap on the stem; wait a day longer and it may all be lost. Some plants make seed all at once. Easiest is to envelop the seeding spray or whole plant in a plastic garbage bag, pull and overturn the plant (leaving the stem and attached soil outside the bag), and shake. Toss the plant in the compost and winnow the seed by tossing in a shallow basket lined with cheesecloth in a gentle breeze. The leaves and chaff will blow off, leaving your seed crop.

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