When to Harvest Your Fruits and Vegetables

From peas and beans to cabbages and cauliflower to soft fruits, here's how to tell when the harvest is ready! Here is everything you need to know when the harvest is ready and here's how to tell when it's the perfect time to harvest your crops!

Root Crops

•Beets and turnips: Ready when golf-ball-sized to tennis-ball-sized.

•Carrots: Ready as soon as they're big enough for your needs. Leave main-crop varieties in the ground until you're ready to use them, including over winter in milder areas.

Soft Fruits

•Blackcurrants: Ready a week after turning black.

•Blueberries: Ready two or three days after turning blue.

Peas and Beans

•Peas and fava beans: Ready when the peas feel well-developed in their pods. Shells need a few to double-check.

•Pole beans and bush beans: Ready when long and smooth, but before beans start to bulge(膨胀) inside.

Potatoes

•Early potatoes: Ready 10 to 12 weeks after planting, when the plants come into flower.

•Main-crop potatoes for storing: Ready 20 weeks after planting, once all the leaves have died back. Without timely harvest, they would be reaped (收获) nothing.

Fruiting Vegetables

•Cucumbers: Ready when there is no pronounced point at the tip and they grow appropriate, which depends on what you need. Can be picked small for snacking cucumbers, or larger for slicing(切片).

•Zucchini: Ready when they reach about 4 inches ( 10 centimeters) long.

•Summer squash: Ready as soon as they reach a desirable length.

Our popular Vegetable Garden Planner can help you map out your garden design, space crops, know when to plant crops in your exact location, and much more. Need crop-specific growing information? Glance at our Crops at a Glance Guide for advice on planting and caring for dozens of garden crops.

Visual language is a form of communication that uses visual elements (元素) as opposed to formal written language to convey meaning or an idea. Graphicacy, the ability to communicate visually, is considered as important as literacy and numeracy, the abilities to read and count. Some people are visual thinkers, using that part of the brain that is emotional and creative to process and give meaning to information. Visual communication can find expression in paintings, drawings, symbols, or simply lines and shapes arranged for a specific effect.

Art is an example of visual language. A painting or sculpture can convey ideas or arouse specific kinds of emotional responses. It may also express ideas about historical events, abstract concepts, or simply be about the way certain shapes or forms "work" together or create a certain effect on the mind. Some researchers believe that different parts of the brain respond in unique ways to colors and shapes.

Pictograms (象形文字) and ideograms (表意文字) are types of visual language. Pictograms are pictures that are similar to what they represent. They are still used today to communicate information. Many people around the world are familiar with the pictograms indicating such things as airports, public facilities, and non-smoking areas indicated by a cigarette in a circle with a line across it. Ideograms are pictures that represent ideas and can often be understood without the aid of written language. Some scholars track modern alphabets to pictures. Letters are actually ancient pictures, and words are a series of pictures. Modern alphabet letters are not only phonetic (语音的) symbols but are based on ancient religious images and symbols.

Musivisual communication is also a part of visual language. The term refers to music created specifically to improve the visual experience of film. It corresponds to the images being seen on the screen, and the music arouses a sense of terror, fear, or other emotions. Most movie goers understand the language of musical clues showing that something dramatic or important is about to happen.

By now，you've likely heard of the metaverse（元宇宙）.

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg sent everyone running to their dictionaries to figure out what he was talking about when he said Facebook was changing its name to Meta and declared the metaverse not only the future for his company, but the future for the Internet.

Actually, the word and concept aren't new. Neal Stephenson made up the term in his 1991 science-fiction book Snow Crash，in which people use avatars（分身）to explore an online world. A number of small metaverses have since developed, where people can do many real life things—like working out, meeting with colleagues, or taking a class—but all online and through a pair of eyeglasses that costs around $ 3, 500 and other more expensive equipment.

"They are virtual worlds where you feel like you're inside a cool video game. But it's so much more than a game because it's like the Internet, where you're socially connected and you can do almost anything in the metaverse, "said Jason Moore who teaches virtual art at Brooklyn College and spends a couple of hours in the metaverse every day. "There are currently a handful of mostly unconnected metaverse platforms, including VRChat, NeosVR, and my studio at the college. "

He hopes that cheaper equipment and faster Internet connections might put it within mainstream applications like tourism and provide us with the most powerful educational tool ever invented within a couple of years.

But Frances Haugen, a former Google's designer, warns that metaverses could harm personal calculation skills and further divide societies as each user stays in their own virtual realities. She is also worried that they are likely to become more addictive than the current social media and rob people of more personal information.