Healthy Hearts Institute

Harvested Sweet Potatoes. It's important to let them cure to allow the starches inside the sweet potatoes to convert to sugars. The proper storage time is for 2 to 3 weeks. What is your favorite way to eat sweet potatoes?

Garlic is one of our favorite crops to plant at the farm. It requires minimal maintenance and naturally repels most pests. Garlic grows best in fertile and loose soil. In around seven or eight months, it will be time to harvest!

Garlic Health Benefits: Boosts immunity, works as an anti-inflammatory, improves cardiovascular health, lowers cholesterol, anti-fungal properties, better hair and skin, helps fend off common ailments, high blood pressure, tick bites, ringworm, and athlete’s foot, to name a few.

It's time to terminate our tomato crops! This is a makeshift compost bin. We are using a wood chipper to shred the plants. The compost ratio is 3 parts brown to 1 part green. This ratio is important to allow microbes to degrade the organic matter being added to the compost pile. The greens contain higher levels of nitrogen than the browns. As the greens age, they lose nitrogen and turn brown.

It’s time to cure our pumpkins! Curing allows the pumpkins to last longer by hardening their skin and protecting the flesh from deterioration. To cure our pumpkins, we cut them off the vine and let them sit in a dry place for at least 2 weeks. Moving on to terminating the vines and preparing the soil for our next crops.

We harvested our first carrots. A carrot is a root vegetable, usually orange in color, though purple, red, black , white, and yellow varieties exist. Carrots are a domesticated form of the wild carrot, Daucus carota, native to Europe and southwestern Asia. Carrots were originally white or purple. Then a yellow carrot appeared through mutation and the familiar orange carrot was bred from it. There are more than 100 species. The name “carrot” comes from the Greek word “karoton.” The beta-carotene that is found in carrots was actually named for the carrot itself.

Happy Wednesday! Harvesting Okra daily is key to having the perfect size for most recipes. Okra pods are usually 2 to 6 inches long, but some can get as large as 7 inches long. The pods on an okra plant will grow to 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) in diameter, with a length of 2 to 6 inches (5 to 15 centimeters).

Okra is native to West Africa. It is believed that Okra first reached the United States from enslaved Africans between the 16th and 18th centuries during the days of slave trafficking. Africans refer to the vegetable as “Ngombo” or "gumbo". Okra is popular in traditional soul food recipes. Here is Okra being grown on our farm.

This has been a great growing season for HHI! Soon, we will be terminating our crops and preparing for the next crop season. You can still enjoy summer fruits and vegetables during the winter months. Try drying, canning, pickling, and freezing them from your kitchen to last all year. There are many Youtube influencing videos to walk you through the steps. We still have tons of tomatoes, sweet peppers, and hot peppers at the farm.

A few “friends” that likes to visit everyday 🦋

First harvested beets. Did you know that beets contain nitrates, which may help increase blood flow to the brain, improve cognitive function and possibly reduce the risk of dementia.