Loquat season is here!

...ed with hundreds upon hundreds (thousands, maybe?) of little yellow-orange fruits. These fruits seem to be nuisances to most homeowners–I rarely see a tree which looks as if it’s being harvested, or if it is, the harvesting does not make a dent in the bounty. After all, how many fresh loquats can you gobble down in a day? All of which is to say I feel no guilt about snagging loquats off of accessible trees as I walk around.* On-the-hoof snacking i...

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Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

...r fruit has a leather-like consistency, enjoy. You swallow the hard seeds, making prickly pear fruit somewhat an acquired taste for some. Chumacero also mentioned that the young pads, “nopalitos” in Spanish, can also be dried for later use. A note to the permaculturalists out there. It’s worth emphasizing that the prickly pear cactus, Opuntia ficus-indica, in my personal experience, is the single most productive plant in our small lot. It’s also t...

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Seed, nut and fruit energy bars

...r sweetness and their binding properties. If you want to use another dried fruit in the mix, I’d recommend you still use dates for at least half the fruit component, just because they are so much the foundation of this recipe. If you can’t find soft sticky Medjool dates, and have to use the lesser, drier kind, try soaking them in water first until they soften up. I’ve heard this works, but haven’t done it myself. Other fruits to consider would inc...

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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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