Food
From our Garden to our Table
Sweet potato harvest. This will feed us for a few weeks in various recipes. When we harvest, we also replant. These are grown in pots. The soil is recycled from TOMATOES. We don't plant again in the same soil. The vines from the harvested sweet potatoes or another growing variety are literally cut and planted in a new pot of soil to get the next generation going. Keep moist until they take hold. Sweet potatoes really like hot and humid weather.
We were not so happy with the Vardaman variety's yield and size compared to the Georgia Jets or the Puerto Ricos. We often microwave these for a fast additional veggie. John eats his with butter, I eat them with a touch of vinegar, salt, and papaya seed pepper (being that I don't like sweet stuff).
And yet another load of broccoli from the sprouts. These are all AFTER the main head has been harvested. Perfect for dipping.
Minutes old and ready for dipping in a home-made blue cheese dressing. Parsley, carrots, cherry tomatoes, broccoli. Broccoli is doing really well now that it is a bit cooler. Side shoots are what you see here.
Sausage and veggies from the garden ready to cook: olive oil, moringa, purple skinned sweet potatoes, green papaya, scallions, carrots. Sausage we bring back from Pennsylvania whenever we visit family. And no, we don't share sausage.
Here is a shot of cabbage cut too close to the root for a second crop. See the "buds"? If these were left on the cabbage stem in the ground they would mature into small mini cabbages.
Pigeon peas. We grew the bush variety versus the tree variety (thank you Jane) and love them. Eat the beans fresh when the pods are green. Or allow to dry on the plant then harvest. Shell while watching TV. Prepare as any dried bean. These will be pigeon peas and rice ala Karen.
Front yards can be filled with edibles. Just in this area we are growing: nasturtium, garlic chives, Okinawa spinach, longevity spinach, pineapple guava, Ceylon spinach, Malabar spinach, Cuban oregano, Puerto Rico mint, cranberry hibiscus, plus blueberries, miracle fruit and rosemary in pots. This area also sprouts volunteer sweet potatoes that I never planted. They rooted on their own when unwanted vines were left as mulch.
Broccoli stalks and carrots ready to be steamed.
We continue to harvest carrots from the plots we planted in late summer, picking the largest carrots and leaving the babies to grow. Carrot leaves are edible too, but way to powerful as a meal. Instead, we dice up the leaves and sprinkle on foods.
When a "branch" of broccoli broke off as a result of wind damage, it did not go to waste. Instead it got sliced up and served as shown above. If the stem is tough, slice or peal off the outer "bark" and eat the center. Mature broccoli leaves are edible too but are very strong flavored so they don't get a lot of mileage in my kitchen at the moment. Tender microgreen broccoli is yummy though.
