Our Summer Harvest 2016

This past summer (summer of '16) we started gardening in earnest. We had two amazingly good crops come in. We planted corn in late June and were able to harvest some beautiful ears in August.

Corn growing high

Corn close up

Our "field" wasn't very big, so we had to do some stalk-shaking to get the germination, but it paid off.

Shucking at our compost pile

More shucking

The smell test

Compared to store-bought corn, ours wasn't so big but was definitely more yellow. We think it was more flavorful.

Big corn, little corn

Enjoying the fruits of our labor

We planted sunflower seeds which shot up at a nice rate. The flowers were large and impressive.

Our sunflowers

We did not have to do our own pollination for the flowers.

Bee careful!

They got big enough that they started to droop (or to point at stars other than our sun, i.e. on the other side of the planet).

Another sun?

We cut off the flowers and began the seed-harvesting process.

Flower on our porch

Making faces

In the house, we picked out seeds.

Looking for seeds

Success!

Some seeds had already been sampled by others of God's creatures, so we had to sort those out from the good ones.

Sorting seeds

Keeping a close eye on things

To make them extra good, we boiled them.

Sunflower seed prep brought to you by Golden Blossom Honey

Some seeds

We also had some good herb harvests, except for the basil which bugs love to snack on. We will definitely getting a big crop next year. We've already planted garlic for spring harvesting!