Hello Hive

A beautiful new day for our community here in Homestead. I'm happy to see your daily blogs and to know that we are all doing well and making progress, most especially in our gardening and blogging
activities.

Okra harvest is here, and not just the harvest alone; we would be learning the proper way to preserve the harvested soup ingredients for future use. It is not enough to grow and harvest crops; we must equally learn about the best methods to preserve our crops so that they can stay in quality condition and be of good use to us for a longer period of time.

Vegetables, especially, are very difficult to preserve. Some of these veggies have very unique ways in which we can preserve them. Tomatoes, for instance, can be boiled, blended, and saved in jars; peppers, on the other hand, can be sundried and blended into powder. Although tomatoes can equally be sun-dried, we have to learn about this process carefully so that while trying to dry the tomatoes, they don't get rotten.

I have seen how my mom used to preserve bigger leaves in her own way. She takes special care to wash the bitterness out of the leaves and gets it boiled before sun-drying.

The one I have come to learn for okra is that you cannot preserve okra in its whole manner, but we will have to cut them into smaller bits like I just did here before sun drying them .

When okra are cut and sundried, they can be blended into powder and used as a soup ingredient. The only difference is that the kind of soup prepared with okra when they are fresh is quite different from how the soup tastes and looks when they are dried.

In times of harvest when okra are surplus in the market, people tend to eat the fresh ones whole. We go ahead to preserve all the ones that would otherwise get spoiled. At the later time of the year, when okra is out of season, that is when we bring out these dried ones to be used in preparing our meals.