Wondering when to harvest your vegetables? Dan Gill explains that there's no single answer.

Home vegetable gardeners put a lot of effort into growing their crops. It’s a shame when they are not harvested properly.

Harvesting at the right stage is important to the quality of the vegetables, but there's no single answer on when to do it. Some should be harvested when the fruit are still immature, including some of the fall warm-season vegetables that still may be in our gardens now, such as summer squash, cucumber, eggplant and mirliton. If you wait too long to harvest these vegetables, the quality quickly declines.

Gardeners also often allow broccoli and cauliflower to go past the proper stage before harvesting.

The vegetables ready to be harvested now are the warm-season vegetables and cool-season vegetables that were planted back in late July, August and September. (There's