Start here
I gave up on a tidy, magazine-looking garden around the time I realized Central Florida doesn’t read the seed packets either. What I’ve got instead is a backyard that grows food most of the year, a kitchen that runs on it, and a basket of half-finished crochet for the days it’s too hot to be outside. That’s the whole site.
Olives & Okra is where I write down what actually works: how to grow food in a hot, backward climate, how to cook it once it’s piling up on the counter, and what to do with the rest. No acreage, no perfect aesthetic, and no pretending I haven’t killed plenty of plants to learn this.
Most of what’s here falls into three buckets.
If you want to grow food
Start in the [Garden]. Down here, the growing year runs from fall through spring, and summer is the season that kills things, which is the opposite of nearly every gardening guide you’ll read. I write for our actual climate, zone 9b, with the crops that take the heat. If you grab one thing on your way in, make it the planting calendar below.
If you want to cook from scratch
Start in the [Kitchen]. Most of what I cook begins in the backyard, so the recipes lean on whatever’s in season, plus the from-scratch staples I make on an ordinary weeknight. When the harvest gets ahead of me, the preserving lives here too: pickling, freezing, putting up the glut before it goes soft.
If you want to make something
Start in [Make It]. This is the slower, hands-busy corner, mostly crochet and sewing for the kitchen and home. Every pattern is free to read. The clean, printable versions are there for when you’d rather not work next to a glowing screen.
One free thing to start with
If you only take one thing from here, take the Central Florida planting calendar. It’s a single page with every crop I grow, when to plant it, and when it comes in, set for zone 9b to 10a. It’s the cheat sheet I wish someone had handed me my first summer, when I planted a spring garden in May and watched it cook. [Grab it free when you join the email list.]
Not sure where to begin
Pick the thing you actually want to do this week. Want to grow something? Start in the garden. Got produce going soft on the counter? Head to the kitchen. Is it 98 degrees out? There’s always crochet. You don’t have to do all of it at once, and I don’t either.
New here and just want something to read? Start with [the okra post]. It’s pretty much the whole site in one go: grow it, cook it, put up what’s left.