Seed Production of Vegetable, Tuber and Spice Crops

Method of Harvesting

• The harvesting of seed or fruits is done manually or mechanically, depending upon the scale of production, cost and availability of skilled labour and or of suitable harvesting machines.
1. Hand picking

• Seeds of some crops such as solanaceous fruits (brinjal, pepper, tomato), cucurbits and sweet corn are conveniently harvested by picking fruits by hand.
  
• The small seeded fruits or seed heads of vegetable crops like onion, carrot, okra or chilli can be cut with a knife or secatures.
  
• Often it is preferable to cut off the whole plant with a matchet or sickle, as in the case of lettuce, chicory, brassicas, radish and peas.
  
• The legumes are, however, usually harvested by pulling up the whole plant and then threshed to recover the seed (e.g. peas and beans).
  
• Although hand harvesting methods are labour intensive, they allow plants to be harvested individually or even at several stages of crop growth. Manual harvesting provides more protection and the maximum potential seed yield per unit area, when compared with the mechanical harvesting.
  
• In plants requiring after ripening, the larger the plant part are cut and removed with the ripening seed results in higher seed yield .
• e.g. the small seeded vegetable crops like lettuce and brassicas.
2. Mechanical harvesting

• Vegetable seed crop may be harvested by employing a suitable mechanical harvester, especially in the large scale commercial seed producing farms where the manual labour is costly.
  
• In the mechanical harvesting, cutting and threshing operations may be carried out by two separate machines or both the operations may be performed by a single combined machine.
  
• The cutting operations can be mechanized, using mowing-windrowing machines, which are most conveniently used for crops like peas, beans, spinach, carrot and brassicas.