Other forms: pickings
Picking is choosing and collecting things one at a time. In a warehouse it is a job title as much as an activity: the order comes in, and someone walks the aisles with a list, taking each item off the shelf.
Outside the warehouse the word follows the crop — fruit picking, apple picking, a summer spent picking strawberries in the rain. Lock picking and pocket picking borrow the same verb for careful work done with the fingers. The plural noun pickings is a different animal: it means whatever is left to be gained, and it lives almost entirely inside two phrases, easy pickings and slim pickings. Picking on someone means bullying them, singling out the same person again and again. And picking at your food is eating tiny amounts of it with no appetite at all.
1nounpickingThe job of collecting ordered items from warehouse shelves.
“Picking and packing both happen on the ground floor.”
2noungatheringThe gathering of fruit or crops by hand.
“The picking starts in late August and lasts about three weeks.”
3nounwhateverWhatever is there to be gained or taken.
“There were slim pickings left on the sale rail by Sunday.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.