Summer Harvest

The only vegetables left in the garden are okra and eggplant.  Eggplants are heirloom from seeds purchased from Burpee.  Heirloom are not always the best way to go.  These eggplants are white with lavender and have no flavor.  The package of seed said the eggplants were mild tasting  which from now on I will translate as no flavor.  Okra is doing okay even though it has rained everyday since the end of June.  Some okra is in the freezer and some I have pickled but the majority has been cooked and eaten.  We love okra.

The summer harvest nearly kicked by butt this year.  Vegetables do not wait until you have the time or energy to do something with them.  No they must be attended to immediately or you will loose the harvest.  So no matter how tired I am when I come home from work I still have hours of work to do at home.  I LOVE IT!!

Once the freezer became full I had to go to other forms of preserving our vegetables.  The top photo is my dehydrated vegetables and the bottom is canned vegetables and pickles.

My dehydrated jars consist of zuchninni , yellow squash, onions, kale, celery, strawberries, and a variety of my herbs.

Canning jars are mostly dill pickles and sweet pickles.  I also canned yellow squash, tomatoes, and carrots.

First year growing carrots -- well not the first year we planted them but it was the first crop we ever harvested. When planting carrots we found that it is important to water them every morning and every afternoon until they sprout up from the ground and then water as needed - usually everyday in Florida -- until they are well established.  Even the frost we had in March did not hurt the carrots. 

Corn did not go so well.  It would have if the worms had not eaten most of the crop.  It was growing pretty big ears.

and when it was shucked the ear was pretty awesome too

We have corn in the freezer but we had to purchase it from another farm.