Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

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. First remove th...

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Urban Homestead Book Signing and Lecture

...rban Eco-Villages and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition present THE URBAN HOMESTEAD Talk, Slide Show and Book-Signing with Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen Thursday June 26th 2008 7:30pm at Los Angeles Eco-Village 117 Bimini Place, LA 90004 Directions at www.laecovillage.org Suggested donation $5, no one turned away for lack of funds Books sold separately for $15 Come hear the authors of the Homegrown Evolution blog and get yourself a copy of t...

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Fallen Fruit

...fruit trees which provide shade, clean the air and feed the people. FALLEN FRUIT is a mapping and manifesto for all the free fruit we can find. Every day there is food somewhere going to waste. We encourage you to find it, tend and harvest it. If you own property, plant food on your perimeter. Share with the world and the world will share with you. Barter, don’t buy! Give things away! You have nothing to lose but your hunger They also have a set o...

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Our new front yard: history

...ers after our foundation work. We’d learned to love its young pads and its fruit, so we left it in place and planted the fruit trees all around it. Climate change? Bad soil? Incompetence? With the exception of the pomegranate we planted at the top of the slope, the front yard orchard never really thrived. We studied books about organic orcharding for clues, without results. The soil on the slope had been mulched since we’d done our first plantings...

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How to Squirrel Proof Your Fruit Trees

...r’s lie. The truth is that you have to stay on top of pruning, irrigation, fruit thinning, fertilizing and pest prevention if you want to harvest any fruit. After not getting a single peach off our small tree last year due to squirrels, I vowed to do things differently this year. I considered a number of squirrel prevention techniques: Metal collars on trunks. This doesn’t work, especially in urban areas. Squirrels are superb acrobats and can simp...

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