Winter Harvest

Abundant Counter Top

While not all of this fruit is from our gardens, most is.  Papaya's are always in season.  With about 5 full grown trees we harvest a half dozen fruits per day.  That is plenty for our morning smoothies and some left over to feed to the animals.  Bananas fruit comes ripe all year long and last week we harvested four bunches of apple bananas. At about 50 bananas to the bunch, that is way more than we can consume fresh.  We dehydrated lots of them and froze the rest, filling multiple zip locks for morning smoothies.  Our electricity is from our hydro electric system on our river, so the energy to freeze and dehydrate is of no consequence.  Avocados are still coming ripe.  I love to eat avocados so we planted about 8 trees about five years ago.  Last year was our first big fruit season for avocado.  Each tree is a different variety so in that way we space out the harvest window.  Avocados typically start coming ripe in the Fall, but we still have several trees holding boatloads of fruit.  Last week I noticed most of our avocado trees are beginning to flower.  Typical for tropical trees is to flower in the Spring and bear fruit in the Fall.  Also pictured is winter squash, purple sweet potatoes and my favorite juice fruit; tangelo.  I have not figured out how to grow onion and garlic here in the tropics but intend to try this year.