Broom Corn–or is it Broomcorn?

Mrs. Homegrown here: This summer I suggested we plant broom corn for no other good reason than I saw the seed pack at the nursery and thought it would be fun to make a broom. (This sort of temporary insanity often overtakes me in the seed aisle.) So without knowing anything at all about broom corn or broom making we planted a block of the stuff. Maybe I should have done a little research into broom making before planting, but I let it slide ...

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Making It

Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen (Rodale Books, 2011) ISBN-13: 978-1605294629 Buy it at:  Amazon • Abe Books • Barnes & Nobel • Powell’s Making It provides you with all of the tools you need to become a producer instead of a consumer and transform your home from the ground up. Projects range from the simple to the ambitious, and include activities done in the home, in the garden an...

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Tuesday Morning Fruit Linkages

We’ve been reading Adam Leith Gollner’s entertaining book The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession and Gollner mentions a number of intreguing internet resources, perfect for a little post holiday weekend surfing: More than you ever wanted to know about the world’s smelliest fruit: Durian (Durian Palace) The California Rare Fruit Growers, “Pushing the Limits of Fruit Growing, Worldwide...

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Medlar: The Best Fruit You’ve Never Heard Of

a Farms. See, Craig has a place up in those hills, and just happened to know his neighbors had a little grove of medlars, and these neighbors agreed to sell them to Craig and Tara, provided Craig and Tara picked them. For us, it was a great excuse for a trip to the mountains with a bunch of friends for some laughs, fresh air and gorgeous fall scenery. Also along for the medlar hunt were Joseph Shuldiner and Graham Keegan. As a group we gathered 1...

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We Grow Houses

...mer apartment of Gianni Versace assassin and spree killer Andrew Cunanan. So when we spotted a NBC news truck near the Homegrown Revolution compound we assumed our Los Angeles neighborhood had produced a new celebrity 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 Ba...

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Los Angeles Fruit Tree Pruning Workshops

Homegrown Neighbor here: Growing fruit trees has obvious rewards. You can eat the fruit at its peak, straight off of the tree, full of flavor, aromatic and juicy. And the sight of an apple, peach or other deciduous tree in bloom is an ephemeral yet breathtakingly beautiful sight. But many of these trees will not bear good fruit without proper pruning. Good pruning encourages stronger limbs able to hold heavy fruits, prevents limb breakage, imp...

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Bare Root Fruit Tree Season is Here!

Yet another Internet “un-boxing.” This time fruit trees. Our bare root fruit tree order just arrived from Bay Laurel Nursery. We ordered: Tropic Snow Peach on Nemaguard rootstock Panamint Nectarine on Citation rootstock CoffeeCake (Nishimura Wase) Persimmon Saijo Persimmon (pollinator for CoffeeCake) Flavor Finale Pluot on Myrobalan 29C rootstock Santa Rosa Plum on Citation rootstock (pollinator for the Flavor Finale Pluot...

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Welcome to the Summer Fruit Season

Homegrown Neighbor here again. I just picked the first peaches of the summer from a tree in my backyard. They are an early variety called Florida Prince. One was so ripe it immediately started oozing fresh peach juice onto my hand which I readily licked off. It was intensely sweet and full of peach flavor. The peaches all have the most wonderful aroma. Grocery store fruit never has a smell that intense and lovely. Yesterday I ate my first plum o...

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Dave Wilson’s Top 21 Fruit Trees for the Southwest US

t Flavor Grenade pluot Flavor King pluot Splash pluot Of the trees on this list, we’ve got the Spice Zee Necta-Plum, a beautiful tree with pink blossoms and  red leaves in the spring that produces a super sweet fruit. It’s still too young to evaluate it’s performance but I’m happy to have it in our garden. We also have a Fuji apple that’s a few years old which is growing but has yet to produce fruit. Last year we a...

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Making Salves, Lip Balms & etc.: Close of the Calendula Series

...an also use essential oils to bring herbal essences into a plain salve.  Once you know how to make salve, you can not only make skin salves, you can make lip balm and headache balm and stick deodorant and homemade cosmetics. It’s a simple technique, but it opens a lot of possibilities. My favorite herbal salve is made out of a mix of equal parts Calendula (pot marigold), chickweed (Stellaria media) and plantain (Plantago major) oils. These...

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