Search Results for: label/fruit

189 results

Mellow Yellow: How to Make Dandelion Wine

Nancy Klehm
Fermentation, Food, Foraging, Recipes
38 Comments
Today on Root Simple we welcome another guest post from our Midwest correspondent Nancy Klehm: In the past week, we Midwesterners have experienced three hard frosts – killing back the growth, that emerged too early of my grapes and hardy kiwis and zapping peach blossoms. We will see if there is any fruit onset and if my vines recover. Meanwhile, it is dandelion wine time! I first tasted dandelion wine when I bought a bottle of it at a folksy gi...

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Worm Composting

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, Vermiculture
2 Comments
...e. One advantage to worm composting is that you can theoretically locate the worms under your sink, providing a close destination for disposing of your kitchen scraps. However, you can find yourself with unpleasant smells and fruit flies if you add too many scraps for the little buggers to digest. We had problems maintaining the correct moisture level in the bin and ended up drowning a bunch of the hapless critters when we accidentally left the w...

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Made in the shade- Passive cooling

Homegrown Neighbor
Domesticus
13 Comments
...rowing space by building an arbor on the back of my house. This shades the back of my house and makes it look much nicer at the same time. I have planted hardy kiwi on it. The kiwi will help to provide shade, give me tasty fruit, and because it is deciduous, it will die back in the Winter to allow in a little more light. Brilliant. This of course is just a few of the things you can do to use less energy to heat and cool your home. But I hope i...

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Tree Spinach – Chenopodium giganteum

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
...nts for a Future database notes can cause nutritional and medical problems. Note to all the raw food fetishists out there–cooking takes care of both oxalic acid and saponins. We ordered our tree spinach from Trade Winds Fruit but it’s also carried by Seeds of Change. We’ll post a full report if and when we get our first harvest. See the update on our first harvest....

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grub

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Composting
11 Comments
...e–what happened to the “wastes”? There is absolutely no waste remaining after this conversion–it has all been transformed into valuable resource.” To raise Hermetia illucens you put vegetable and fruit trimmings in a container with a small opening for the black soldier fly females to fly in and lay their eggs and a method for the grubs to climb out of the compost. You can also feed them small amounts of fish and mea...

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Greywater Fed Tomato Plant Takes Over The World

Homegrown Neighbor
Water and Power, Water Conservation
7 Comments
Homegrown Neighbor Here: So a few months ago Mr. Homegrown helped me install a simple ‘laundry to landscape’ greywater system. Most of the plants that get watered by the system didn’t get much water before and were just barely surviving. There are several fruit trees, a rhubarb plant and an assortment of perennial herbs lining a narrow strip of land along the side of the house. Now, the plants getting fed by the greywater are...

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Washing Machine Greywater Resources

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
5 Comments
...t make sure they didn’t have nasty chemicals in them. See our greywater surge tank post for what kind of barrel we like to use. Note that you can also turn a surge tank into a rain barrel. A description of our greywater fruit mini-orchard. Our greywater surge tank version 1.0. We’ve since added a pantyhose filter as seen above to catch lint that can clog the tank and garden hose. It’s just some threaded ABS waste pipe fittings s...

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Book Review: A Feast of Weeds by Luigi Ballerini

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
7 Comments
...is is an understandable mistake for an Italian to make. For some odd reason only the people of the New World eat the pads of prickly pear–in the Mediterranean and Middle-East, where the plant has been imported, only the fruit is consumed. I’m looking forward to cooking up some of the recipes, which were contributed by Ada De Santis, who runs a farm on the Salentine peninsula of southern Puglia. Thanks to A Feast of Weeds, there will b...

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California’s New Greywater Code: Common Sense Legalized!

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
8 Comments
On the left is our yard which is irrigated by the washing machine. On the right, the neighbor’s yard which is never watered. This Tuesday the California Building Standards Commission legalized our formally outlaw greywater system. For several years now, we’ve sent our washing machine waste water out to fruit trees in the front yard. The new regulations are a rare common sense moment for our otherwise troubled state government. Let&...

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