Harvest Monday!!

My garden is small. We live on Military housing in Hawaii and everything is in containers or a couple raised beds my husband built for me here. Things have been slow and coming with the garden here. A lot of growing but not much success with a LOT of things. I started planting late last March or early April. I had to leave though for a month and a half and my family didn't water much and I pretty much had to start over again. I am dealing with maggots in my peppers, not enough bee's for polination, diseases I can not figure out, and bugs that seem to not be deterred by chemicals. It is a learning process. I am convinced that It will only make me a better gardener in the long run..lol Glass half full...Glass half full...

First the hot peppers. I have many plants that are quite old now. The first four sets of peppers I was unable to use because of the larva that was laid in them and making them ALL rot. I have since started harvesting them before they are mature and pickling them for use later. This has worked quite well and I am finally getting happy. I grow habanero's, Hawaiian Chili's, (very tiny but super hot these grow much like explosive embers but the plants get much bigger and the fruit is a pale green at first and then turning orange to red), and Serrano's now. Also there is a chili plant that I don't know the name. I have to pick them as well early. I have learned to stay away from the more thinner skinned peppers because of the flying creatures that lay larva in them. Not a huge amount here but enough for 3/4 of a pint for pickling. I'll take what i can get.

Snow peas, green beans, and my first green pepper...:-) I picked the green pepper early as well. I started two new plants in a raised bed that has tomatoes, corn, cabbage, cucumbers etc. For some reason this one had no signs of starting to rot like every one of them in the past. (I have had to throw out about 10 bell pepper plants that the fruit just kept rotting and larva was laid in all the fruit) So this little guy makes me smile. My pole beans took a hit recently when we had rain and wind storms a couple weekends ago. A lot of the leaves died off so I'm hoping they will come back now that the weather has calmed. Until then, as with everything else...I will take what I can get. 

This is half of the chives I harvested. The other half went to my neighbor. They were needing a haircut. Also not pictured was a nice bunch of green onions that I cleaned and sent to her as well. I love growing them but seem to not use them as often as yellow onions when cooking. I hate for things to go to waste. 

I was finally able to get some cucumbers off of that set of plants that i pictured in another post. I got like 6 or so. I had to cut the bad spots off of them and then made my first jar of pickles after long long months of not getting any cucumbers. That made me happy to finally have a jar of pickles on my shelves. The smallest things make me happy these days. 

I noticed that a few of my carrots seemed almost ready and since it has been a while that I was able to have sauteed veggies from the garden I thought I would pick a few for dinner last night. I love the way carrots look in dishes. They are so bright and colorful!

Even from such a small harvest I was able to put most of it together with our steak dinner last night. I sauteed  the carrots, peas, chives, one radish not pictured, and the handful of green beans with some garlic, salt and pepper in olive oil...IT WAS DELICIOUS! 

Thanks for reading and stop by Daphne's Dandelions http://daphnesdandelions.blogspot.com/  to check out everyone else's harvest this week. A big thank you to Daphne for hosting!