10 Unkillable Vegetables That Actually THRIVE In Florida Summer Heat.

It took me the better part of a decade to figure out not just what wants to grow here in Florida during the summer, but actually thrives, and more importantly, tastes good. So let me walk you through my 10 summer vegetables that you should be growing in your very hot Florida garden. Number one, and in no particular order, is going to be this guy behind me, which is sweet potatoes. I grow sweet potatoes from store-bought sweet potatoes. You can find an organic sweet potato, you can grow slips, which is how these guys are grown, and plant them in whatever you want. Raised beds, in ground containers, green stalks, vertical containers. I grow them in everything, and they do well. Cool thing is they love the heat. They absolutely are in full sun here all day long, but they can handle some partial shade too. And you eat the tubers when they're ready, but before they're ready, you can actually eat the greens, which is basically two harvests in one. They protect the soil so that it keeps like a nice ground cover here, and protects the soil life underneath, so you're not like losing a bunch of nutrients or loss due to the sun's rays. If you think that nothing is fun to grow during the summer, you are wrong, because you can grow melons, and in particular, watermelons. This one is a jubilee, but I'm also growing an onza. I love the moon and stars, and these guys take over. Now, they don't necessarily make it all the way through summer, but they go pretty far. I mean, it's like August right now, and they're like doing very, very well this year compared to previous years. I'm gonna account for that because of the drought that we've had, but you can get a lot of different varieties, and you can succession plant them. You're gonna start them in March, and just keep succession planting all the way, and you will have watermelons around the clock. You can do seedless, you can do seeded, you can do these big huge ones, you can do icebox ones, you can do personal ones. There is a watermelon out there for every single kind of person, and it's a nice little sweet treat when it's hot out. Number three on our list is gonna be cow peas, and this is a group of plants, because right here, I have Puerto Rican black beans, and I also have long beans, but you could also do black eyed peas, which are cow peas. So, the long beans, the variant types of cow peas, like Puerto Rican black fields and whipper wheels, which are black beans, and then something that looks like a pinto, nice alternatives to typical beans that maybe don't absolutely love flowering during our summer, and then the long beans, which you can eat as green beans, and then the black eyed peas, which some people love. I'm not a huge fan, but there is so many different kinds of cow peas that you can grow, and an array of different flavors and sizes, eating them green as green beans, eating them as dry beans. There's a lot that you can do, and they make a great cover. As you can see, this is getting very, very big, and it's going to create a lot of biomass that I can use and put back into my soil, or put back into my compost. It also covers the soil, just like those sweet potatoes do, and keeping this soil nice and cool, and also protecting the soil biology. So, a lot of really good reasons to grow these guys. If you don't even eat them, you can still grow them for a lot of benefit. And if you want to learn more about growing here in Florida, you're going to want to check out my Homegrown Florida Gardening Guide eBook. It has pretty much everything you ever want to know about growing vegetables here in Florida on the Annual Vegetable Garden, 30 chapters, 30 different vegetables. It tells you everything you want to know. So, pest management, disease management, how to plant, favorite varieties, how many to feed a family for, container gardening, companion planting. I can't think of anything it doesn't include. So, make sure to check it out. There is a sample chapter on my site that you can take a look at, so you can get an idea of what it's going to contain. Number four on our list is going to be peppers. This guy right here. This is a roulette habanera. So, hot peppers tend to do better during the summer than something like bell peppers, but you can also grow seasoned peppers. These are going to be like the aji dulce, the sofrita pepper. I'm never going to say that right. Aji dulce, which I believe is what they use for sofrita, but they're like what's considered seasoning peppers. I always called them like the sweet peppers of the summer, but I think seasoning is considered a more appropriate term. The cool thing is this right here is technically a habanero. It's a roulette habanero, but it's a sweet habanero. So, it actually is not hot. They bred all the heat out of it. Iquitos is another one that I really love to grow. The bell peppers are not going to do as well because the bell peppers and some of the little snacky peppers are not going to do super great because they don't absolutely love super high temperatures, but when you can find these seasoned peppers or the banana peppers or the peppers that are a little bit unconventional, you can find them in sweet varieties and it could take the place of the bell peppers. Now, I'm not a fan of this next one, which is okra. My plants are all dead now, but I let a few dry on the plant so that I can save seeds. I tried growing okra. I've tried it so many times. I just don't love okra, but it does grow really well and if you are a fan of okra, which I'm told pickled is good, fried is good, they love to grow during the summer here and so you can absolutely grow them all summer long. They're a really fun plant. They get super tall, but there are dwarf varieties if you want a smaller container garden. It's a great addition if you're really dealing with a lot of full sun bed. Number six on our list is going to be this guy right here. If you think that you can't grow pumpkins or squash during the summer, you absolutely can. You just have to be really specific of varieties. This is a seminal pumpkin, which is a really great winter squash. It takes the place of a butternut squash and it's prolific and you don't need ground space. I grow this thing up my palm tree every single year and it gives me all the pumpkins I need for the year. It's usually two or three plants. I start with four and it just kind of a few of them just die off naturally for whatever reason and then I end up with whichever ones grow and if you didn't know this, this is actually one of the ways that Native Americans used to grow seminal pumpkins here way back in the day is they would grow them up a felded or dead trees. I just grow them up a palm tree because the palm tree has the little it's a bearded palm so it has the little palm fronds that stick out and it's a great way to like hook it up there. You do kind of got to train it but it does really great right here and it's a very shaded spot and it does well in the shade but it also does well in the sun and full sun. All these big leaves kind of do the same thing that the sweet potatoes, the cowpeas, and the watermelon does which is it covers the ground. It covers different areas to give it a natural ground cover which kind of protects the soil and everything is about protecting the soil. Now if you're interested in any of these varieties that I've been mentioning so far I'm going to put them down into the description and I'll list with the links. We're in a very shady spot in my garden but right here you might have noticed that there is some turmeric by my pool and in my shade garden I also have ginger. Ginger and turmeric I'm going to put them together because I feel like they're like basically the same plant when it comes to growing them they're so similar. They can grow in full sun. They can grow in shade. They kind of like an in-between but they're going to do well either way. They can grow in containers. They can grow in the ground. You can grow edible ginger. You can grow ornamental ginger. You can grow medicinal turmeric. You can grow edible culinary turmeric. There's a lot of varieties. I think it's like 1,600 different kinds of ginger that you can grow that is actually edible. So it is a wide variety of things and you can use them medicinally. You can use them as tea. You can use them in cooking. Pair it with some lemongrass. It's going to be the most amazing dishes that you've ever made. Now this next one I know trips a lot of people up which is going to be the tropical spinaches. There's a lot of different kinds like red malabar, longevity, okinawa, egyptian, ethiopian kale. It's just like the summer greens that don't mind growing during the heat in tropical areas. Most of those don't taste great. I'm not gonna lie. I am not a fan of a lot of them. I do like egyptian spinach but I feel like the texture is so different. It's so foreign to me that it's difficult for me to cook with but this little guy right here I absolutely love. Take a look at that close up. That leaf looks like baby spinach. It cooks down like baby spinach. It's a little bit thicker so it does take a little bit longer to steam and cook but flavor-wise it's incredibly like baby spinach. You can eat it cooked or raw. It's a great shade garden so if you have a lot of shady areas like I do, I grow them underneath my fruit trees and they propagate very well from cutting so I can kind of just take a cutting and spread it everywhere and I have all the greens that we need during the summer without having to grow too much inside. One of my absolute favorite things to grow starting in spring all the way to fall is going to be roselle or sorrel. It is a hibiscus plant that when it is full grown it has these nice green leaves and it produces a flower that looks kind of like okra or a regular hibiscus and then the bottom part of the flower which is called the calyx will swell and turn into a piece of red fruit. They actually come in white as well so red and white fruit but the red is probably the more popular and you may know it commonly referred to as red zinger tea which is what that fruit is most used for. I use it as a cranberry substitute. I made a white roselle cranberry jam which is to die for. I'm talking it is one of the best jams that I've ever made. I love it so much but you can use it as a cranberry replacement come Thanksgiving. It does take a long time to grow. You want to kind of grow the plant very very big and bushy and then in fall the daylight numbers trigger it to start flowering so it's not like a set length of time. Although they have developed some varieties that can grow within a certain set length of time but most are going to start flowering in fall and that's when you're going to harvest them and then you can dry them or can them in whatever way that you want. I grew so much last year I ended up harvesting three years supply which is why I'm not growing any right now but I'll show you the pictures of all the ones that I did grow from last year that produced that huge amount. I have enough for tea cranberries and jam for the next like three to five years. I'm not even sure. It's so much buckets and buckets of roselle. Now this next one is a little bit unique. It is a perennial. It's called pigeon peas and this is a great plant to grow for multiple reasons. One you can definitely get a good harvest from these. I started this guy way back in February or March and he's been growing all this time and he's going to keep growing and then he's going to produce me beans. You can eat the green pods as like an edamame or you can let them fully dry and you'll have like this mix of nice cool like brownish brownish white beans and you can eat those like a dry bean and this plant is really cool because it is a perennial and it is in the legume family. When it comes winter time or whatever you can kind of chop it down chop it back and use it as chop and drop which is fertilizer for your garden and plants. So it's going to push nitrogen and it's a media area. It's going to get super big. This is actually fairly small and I'm growing it in a container which is wild I know but I ran out of full sun space. It does like full sun but when you put it in a permanent spot and it gets very big it's going to create a lot of foliage that you can use as that chop and drop replacement fertilizer for your garden. So I hope this gives you an idea of all the different things that you can grow in your Florida summer 100 degree heat garden. It is hot out there now you don't necessarily want to start all of these right now. A lot of them are towards the end of their season but you do want to consider getting the seeds now or getting the plants now because they are tend to be a little bit harder to find the further we get away from summer. So here is your notice. Thanks so much for hanging out with me today. Happy gardening!