The World of Gardening 2016

Gardening is an art that you must have a passion for in order to reap the benefits of the things that you grow. This year we decided to have a bigger garden than previous years. Although, only one of the vegetables that we have planted did not do anything this year was our zucchini. What a shame because we were excited to have some zucchini to eat. Some of the things that we have planted this year were bush beans, squash, okra, eggplant, cilantro, dill, parsley, sage, tarragon, cherry tomatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, potatoes, cucumbers, watermelon, oregano, and rosemary. All these things have produced this year and we have a freezer full of vegetables, and herbs. Although some of the vegetables are still producing our squash is not because of the heat here in Florida. Next, year we are going to use shade cloth to keep the sun from destroying our plants.

This has turned out to be a wonderful investment normally, potatoes take 110 days to mature but our red potatoes did not take as long. We ended up with a bunch of potatoes that we could not use all at the same time. We ended up giving some away to people that I work with because we had so many of them. We are still eating on them as we speak last night we made a pot roast and put some of the garlic in the roast and potatoes and onions around it. Quite amazing dinner with the fresh vegetables, and herbs.

Squash we have had lots of squash this year compared to last year and we have had it in a variety of ways. We tried a squash casserole but it did not turn out that well. We have fried it and put most of it in the freezer for later use. Although the hot weather here has made it die off faster than it should. However, we are planning on planting some more in the back away from the sun so that they have a chance to produce more squash for us to eat.

Bush beans produce quite a bit of beans or the short amount of time that they are in the ground. We have personally, put some in the freezer and cooked about three pots full of beans and we are planting more in a couple of days so that we get some more throughout the rest of the summer months. Here in Florida you can have multiple gardens throughout the year and stock up on some of the most favorite foods that your family loves to eat.

Pepper’s we have a variety of pepper’s like we did last year and they are producing quite a few. Although we are using a dehydrator for some of the pepper’s and herbs that we have grown in our garden this year. We also can dehydrate some of the other vegetables however, they are not around long enough for us to steam them and get them ready for dehydrating.