Search Results for: label/fruit

185 results

Backyard Orchard Culture

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
7 Comments
How small can you go? An image from the Dave Wilson website demonstrating one way to keep a fruit tree a manageable size. Damn. I wish I had heard this lecture twelve years ago when we bought our house. “Rock star orchardist” Tom Spellman, a sales manager with Dave Wilson nursery, gave a remarkable talk last night on how to create your own backyard orchard. He began by dismissing most advice on growing fruit trees, noting t...

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Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
13 Comments
Prickly pear fruit chip–some specimens are purple, our produces orange fruit It’s prickly pear fruit season. I know this both by the view out our front window and from the comments trickling in on an old post on how to make prickly pear fruit jelly. Thanks to a tip from Oliva Chumacero at the Farmlab, I now have another way of dealing with an over-abundance of this spiny fruit: slice it and dry it to make prickly pear fruit chips....

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Fallen Fruit

Mr. Homegrown
Events, Food, Foraging, Gardening
2 Comments
Homegrown Revolution tagged along on a neighborhood tour with the beige jump-suit clad fruit foraging collective known as Fallen Fruit. Our capable guides, David Burns, Matias Viegener, and Austin Young, led a group of well over fifty folks through a hilly part of Silver Lake just above the 99 cent store in search of street grown loquats, (in great abundance right now) kumquats, oranges, lemons, bananas, carob trees and more. We all ended up bac...

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Remember to Label Those Jars!

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation
10 Comments
s ago. At the time I probably thought to myself, “I’ll label them in the morning.” Not only should the jars be labeled, but it would also have been nice to have some notes on the recipe I used and where the fruit was sourced from. To this end I’ve started a preservation diary in a useful program called Evernote. Perhaps I should get a tattoo on my forearm that says, “Label, label, label.”...

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Low Sugar Prickly Pear Jelly Recipe

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
71 Comments
Few plants have as many uses as the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica). In our climate it grows like a weed, with no supplemental irrigation, and produces a voluminous amount of edible pads and fruit. In addition to food, Opuntia provides medicinal compounds, a hair conditioner, building materials and habitat for the red dye producing cochineal scale insect. As for the fruit, you can consume it raw, dry it or make jelly. Several years...

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How to Juice Prickly Pear Fruit

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, How-to
9 Comments
Joseph working the thrift-store mill I always know it’s prickly pear fruit season when questions start coming in on a recipe I did for a prickly pear fruit jelly. Unfortunately, the mucilaginous and seedy texture of the fruit makes it difficult to work with. The only tested recipe I could find, for a prickly pear marmalade in the Ball Blue Book, says nothing about how to seed or juice the fruit. With the assistance of two fellow...

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How to Order Bare Root Fruit Trees

Mr. Homegrown
Fruit Trees, Gardening
4 Comments
The trees we planted in 2011–all doing well now. Ladies and gentleman, it’s time to get your bare root fruit tree orders in! The massive wave of common sense that’s swept over the world since the 2008 econopocolypse has got people thinking about planting trees that provide more than just shade. Last year many nurseries ran out of stock. And bare root trees are a great way to save money. The time to order, for delivery...

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How To Make Hoshigaki (Dried Persimmons)

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation, How-to
11 Comments
...t. While a lot can go wrong in the month it takes to make Hoschigaki, the process is not all that complicated. The persimmons used to make Hoshigaki are astringent varieties such as Hachiya. Ideally you leave the stems on the fruit when you pick them. You start with firm fruit, though a few soft spots are ok. The first step is to cut the top off, while carefully leaving the stem that they will hang from. Note the knife trick you use to do this. T...

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How to Keep Squirrels and Birds From Eating Your Fruit

Mr. Homegrown
Fruit Trees, Gardening, Pests
7 Comments
Photo by Noel Ramos. Got a tip from Noel Ramos a.k.a. Florida Green Man on how to deal with those pesky squirrels and birds in your fruit orchard. Noel says: I use those clear plastic fruit containers that are used for packing strawberries and grapes. I personally don’t buy fruit in these containers but I asked some neighbors and friends to save them for me and in a short time amassed a large collection. They snap shut over most fruit like...

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We Grow Houses

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Pests
2 Comments
...brity killer. It turned out instead to be a photo op for the County of Los Angeles Agricultural Commissioner/Weights and Measures who had deployed the truck pictured above to spray pesticide due to an invasion of the oriental Fruit Fly Bactrocera dorsalis. Two traps in the area picked up some specimens of this interloper which can quickly turn a fruit harvest into a maggot infested disaster. The eradication technique used, the “male annihil...

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