Search Results for: label/fruit

187 results

End of Season Tomato Review

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
7 Comments
...award goes to the Pineapple variety pictured above. Not only did this heirloom tomato have the best flavor, it was also the prettiest tomato we’ve ever grown, a brilliant yellow with streaks of red in the middle of the fruit when you slice it. And they’re just about as big as a Cadillac Escalade. We saved some seeds and will definitely be growing these again next year. The most productive, trouble free and productive tomatoes this...

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Waiting for our tomatoes/Tomatoland

Mrs. Homegrown
Reviews, Thoughtstylings, Tomatoes
17 Comments
...our yard–and make do with canned and dried tomatoes for the rest of the year. Basically, we believe that fresh tomatoes are a privilege, not a right. Right now our tomato plants are covered with blossoms and tiny green fruit, and I’m almost frantic for fresh tomatoes. (The basil is in! Where’s the tomatoes?!?) Yet I know better than to buy a tomato at a store. I haven’t for years. In this excerpt, Estabrook explains why...

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How to Process Carob

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Recipes
6 Comments
..., the pods of the carob tree. After. Photo by Bill Wheelock. In the Middle East carob has a reputation as a famine food. According to the carob article in Wikipedia the people of Malta ate carob pods and prickly pear fruit during WWII. How appropriate then that my neighbor Bill Wheelock, who just dehydrated a huge batch of my prickly pear fruit (and faced the thorny consequences), took on the onerous task of figuring out how to dry carob...

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Tomato Report: Indigo Rose

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
12 Comments
Another tomato I got to taste on my trip up California’s central coast was the striking, nearly black “Indigo Rose”. The Indigo Rose tomato was bred conventionally by Oregon State University specifically to have high levels of antioxidants. Those antioxidants are in the tomato thanks to a class of flavonoids called anthocyanin, substances which also give the fruit its dark color. According to Oregon State, Indigo Rose’s...

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Mallow (Malva parviflora) an Edible Friend

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
18 Comments
...s the best time of year to forage for wild edible weeds. We’ll highlight a few of these edible weeds in the next few months beginning today with Mallow (Malva parviflora also known as cheeseweed because the shape of the fruit resembles a round of cheese), which grows in great abundance in lawns and parkways. Malva parviflora does not have an especially strong or exciting taste, but does make a pleasant addition to salads and can be cooked a...

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Playin’ Possum

Mr. Homegrown
Pests
20 Comments
..., opossums eat both eggs and chickens. As with all such pest problems I went straight to the University of California integrated pest management website where I found a helpful article on opossums. The advice: Pick up fallen fruit (I’m pretty good about this). Eliminate wood piles (I’ve got one I need to eliminate). Don’t leave pet food outside (I never do this, though I had forgotten about a mostly empty bag of chicken feed th...

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Growing Home: Agriculture in the City

Mrs. Homegrown
Events
3 Comments
...will be there (Full Circle), as well as Tara of Silver Lake Farms–she who knows everything about soil and helped us redesign our garden. Our buddies from Backwards Beekeepers will be there, too.  Food Not Lawns, Fallen Fruit…all these people are so amazing , its hard to even choose highlights.  Seriously. If you live in So. Cal, you have to come. Come and say hi. Growing Home Saturday, November 13, 8:30am-5:30pm In celebration of a...

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Guilt Free Ice Pops

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
9 Comments
...All you need is a ice pop mold and a freezer. What follows are a few links to recipes for healthy ice pops, perfect for those hot August days: Homestead Survival has a recipe for orange blossom water popsicles. They are just fruit, water, honey, lemon juice and some orange blossom water. The Sweet Life has some chocolate dipped peanut banana bars that look amazing. I’ve been making ice pops out of Fany Gerson’s book Paletas: Authent...

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Growing Strawberries in a Self Irrigating Gutter (SIG).

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers
12 Comments
...s There’s a lot of plastic here, specifically PVC, which is an environmental and health disaster. I have two questions–how much PVC is leached into the growing medium and how much of it would be taken up into the fruit? I don’t have an answer to either. If you know of science-based information (i.e. not Livestrong articles) on PVC and growing food please leave a link. Generally, plants do not take up toxins into fruit so I̵...

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Homemade Teeccino

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Herbs, Recipes
13 Comments
...anic chicory, almonds, organic dates, natural coffee flavor, organic figs. The Maya French Roast is simpler: Roasted organic carob, organic barley, organic chicory, organic ramon nuts, organic coffee flavor.  The vague dried fruit flavor the figs and dates bring to the Java I can do without. I don’t know that the nuts or the barley add all that much, overall. And the coffee flavoring–enough said. I decided the Teeccino secret was all...

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