067 Wild Drinks and Cocktails With Emily Han

...en “wildcrafting” and “foraging” and how you can use easily foraged herbs, fruits, pine needles and flowers to make shrubs, switchels, tonics and infusions. Emily also shares her easy distillation method and advice on what to do with all those prickly pear fruits! If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and...

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Our new front yard: history

...our feet. It looked Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree, with one or two annual fruits weighing down its five spindly branches. We has chosen all the trees by their chill hours–meaning they should have been adapted enough to our warm climate to produce fruit, but it has been getting warmer and warmer here in the last few years. It is possible that they were simply not getting enough cold hours to fruit. Or maybe the persistent heat and dryness was just...

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The Glorious USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

...partment of Agriculture’s online collection of watercolor illustrations of fruits and nuts demonstrates how scientific illustration can be both useful and beautiful. The collection spans the years 1886 to 1942. The majority of the paintings were created between 1894 and 1916. The plant specimens represented by these artworks originated in 29 countries and 51 states and territories in the U.S. There are 7,497 watercolor paintings, 87 line drawings,...

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Loquat season is here!

...ds 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 is one of the p...

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Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

...k to that later.) Stock stuff ready for the pot Note I’m leaving the stock vegetables in big chunks because I intend to take them out later. I want my final product to be plain beans, not vegetable bean soup. Leaving the pieces big makes them easy to fish out at the end. The herbs are tied in a bundle with a piece of string for the same reason. The added benefit of this is that you don’t have to chop or peel to getting this together. Note I didn’t...

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