Search Results for: label/flowers

104 results

The glass is half full–even if it’s full of greywater

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Food, Gardening, Mistakes, Thoughtstylings
17 Comments
...such a problem? Too many artichokes? Oh noes! Ours grow happily entwined with fennel (which was too small at the time to be seen in the shot above). Fennel is another weedy survivor here. We can harvest the bulbs, or eat the flowers and fronds, or do nothing and just let the pollinators have at it. Today I was sitting by the fennel patch. The flowers are full of pollen, and the air above it looked like LAX: honeybees, wasps, orchard mason bees,...

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Spigarello: Nature’s way of saying that broccoli is so over

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
22 Comments
Spiga-what-the-who-now? The wavy leaved stuff is the spigarello. The flowers are arugula. Mrs. Homegrown here: Spigarello, more properly called Cavolo Broccolo a Getti di Napoli, is a leafy green that tastes a lot like broccoli. But unlike broccoli, you eat the leaves instead of the flowers. Unlike many of the “exotic” Italian greens we grow, this one is not bitter, and probably will pass muster with those who are fussy abou...

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Borage: It’s what’s for dinner

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Gardening, Herbs
13 Comments
image courtesy of wikimedia commons Our friend Milli (Master Gardener of the Milagro Allegro community garden) stopped by today to pick up some sourdough starter. On seeing our back yard swamped abundant with borage (Borago officinalis), she mentioned that she’s been really digging borage tacos lately. This was very exciting news to us, because we’d never eaten our borage leaves–only the flowers. So tonight I went out...

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Mutant Squash

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
...e Shoenholz Compound – neither Elon, wife Bryn nor new bambina Nusia eat squash – so the origin of this new hybrid compost squash is a mystery. This brings up a bit of botany. Plants “do the deed” with flowers which contain both male (pollen-producing stamen) and female (carpels) organs. Flowers produce seeds, which depending on how they were pollinated may or may not produce offspring that resemble the parent. Some plants...

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Advances in Gardening Series: Thoughts on The Fan, and the problems of overabudance

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
10 Comments
The Fan late in the season, about to be pulled out. See earlier photos of The Fan here. Mrs. Homegrown here: Last fall we dug up a sort of feral herb bed and replaced it with a more formal, three-part bed that I call The Fan. The idea is to use this bed to plant annual herbs and flowers. While some of these plants are medicinal, it is also a bed dedicated more to aesthetics than the rest of our garden, so it’s also a place where I...

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Moringa!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Permaculture
1 Comment
...commonly consumed in India, and are generally prepared in a similar fashion to green beans and have a slight asparagus taste. The seeds are sometimes removed from more mature pods and eaten like peas or roasted like nuts. The flowers are edible when cooked, and are said to taste like mushrooms. The roots are shredded and used as a condiment in the same way as horseradish, however it contains the alkaloid spirochin, a potentially fatal nerve paral...

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Borage (Borago officinalis)

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
Borage, just about to bloom. Borage is an ugly sounding name for a beautiful and useful plant. The moniker is probably a corruption of the Andalusian Arabic abu buraq or “father of sweat”, a reference to it’s diaphoretic qualities1. Both the leaves and the blue flowers (sometimes white flowers) are edible and have a refreshing cucumber like taste. Borage is an annual herb that we plant in the late fall here in Los Angeles for...

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Growing and Preparing Cardoons (Cynara cardunculus)

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
20 Comments
It’s the ultimate pain in the ass vegetable to prepare and I’ll probably get in big trouble in native plant circles for even mentioning it, but just last night I fried up my first successful plate of homegrown cardoons (Cynara cardunculus). Not the most attractive blanching job, admittedly. All ready to prepare The cardoon is a close relative of artichoke, identical in appearance, except that the flowers are much smaller and t...

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How to make a Calendula oil infusion

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Calendula series, Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, How-to
25 Comments
...ine the strainer with cheese cloth or muslin. Strain the oil into a fresh, clean jar. Pour off the oil first, then press the dried matter to squeeze out the remaining oil as best you can. You’ll never get it all back. Label it  Make sure you label it with the type of oil and the date it was made. Believe me, even if you only make one jar, you’ll forget what it is and when you made it, and a year later you’ll be standing at yo...

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Bar Codes on Veggies

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
6 Comments
...y of vegetables grown in that prefecture. Ibaraki Prefectural authorities and the JA Ibaraki Prefecture Central Union of Agricultural Cooperative cooperating with other farming and agricultural associations are adding QR code labels right at the point of origin. In the supermarket, consumers use camera equipped cell phones to scan the QR code on the label. The code links to a mobile website detailing origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer c...

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