Search Results for: label/fruits and veg

74 results

Vertical Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
Frederick Law Olmstead’s office has a 19th century “vertical garden.” Vines! I was somewhat dismayed to see a local newspaper article touting a company that sells a $1,000 vertical vegetable garden system to schools. The company has a plan to sell this system nationwide. The problem is that I have serious doubts about the long term viability of vertical garden walls for a number of reasons: irrigation, maintenance and start u...

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Kent’s Composting Tips and Secret Weapon

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
icularly with some worms and bugs to propagate the new pile. I’m not fastidious about what goes in, so the occasional fish and chicken scraps and leftover cat food gets into the mix, even oily stuff, but mostly it’s the usual veggies, fruits, paper napkins, etc. Though experts say no fats should go in, I’ve yet to see (or smell) a problem. Each time I add new kitchen scraps, I add 1-2 shovels-full of dry leaves and some water if needed, turning a...

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Book Review: Attracting Native Pollinators: The Xerces Society Guide to Conserving North American Bees and Butterflies and Their Habitat

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees, Reviews
8 Comments
How can we save the world? Simple. Get everyone to read and understand the contents of a new book, Attracting Native Pollinators: The Xerces Society Guide to Conserving North American Bees and Butterflies and Their Habitat. Why? There’s the obvious–pollinating insects provide a huge amount of our food–but they also have a few unappreciated roles. Without pollinators, plant communities that stabilize river banks disappear. Ma...

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Cure for Prickly Pear Stickers

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening
15 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Hallelujah! Last night, our friend Oscar (genius man!) told us how to deal with the dreaded, pernicious, invisible prickly pear fruit stickers (glochids) which somehow end up embedded in my hands every time Erik brings one of those fruits in the house. The answer? Pumice stone. It’s so simple. Just rub the site with a pumice stone. I think it just shaves off the top part of the stickler, and then lower part works its...

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Lord of the Flies Inspired Bike Rack

Homegrown Neighbor
Bikes
3 Comments
o it. Obviously it was designed to celebrate the market, where meat, produce, spices, nuts and almost any imaginable type of ethnic food can be found. The top is adorned with two pigs’ heads. The corners have fruits and vegetables in them. I think it is kind of grotesque but very eye-catching. I also like that it has  four posts, allowing a lot of well spaced area to lock your bike to....

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Freezing Meat With Freezer Paper

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation, How-to
14 Comments
A good question came in on Friday’s post about freezing fruits and vegetables about how to freeze meat products without using plastic bags. I don’t know of a way to avoid plastic with meat products, but you can use freezer paper instead of ziplock bags. The University of Georgia Extension Service has a handy info sheet on how to wrap meat with freezer paper: Freezing Animal Products. Correction: an earlier version of this post was e...

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Red Cabbage Kraut

Homegrown Neighbor
Fermentation, Food
11 Comments
all of your food. I like to eat it on eggs. It stains the egg whites a lovely shade of blue and purple. Plus I’m sure the bright color represents some kind of potent cancer fighting compound. Brightly colored fruits and vegetables are good for you. Artificially colored foods, not so much. And of course sauerkraut is a naturally fermented food. This means it contains live bacteria. Don’t worry- bacteria are everywhere, you just have t...

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Physalis pruinosa a.k.a. “Ground Cherry”

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
9 Comments
...ped for thousands of miles and are therefore both durable and, inevitably, tasteless. Cultivating strange things like this is one of the best arguments for growing your own food–access to flavorful and exotic fruits and vegetables. The very similar Cape Gooseberry (Physalis perviana) is commercially cultivated in many places in the world but is not considered an important crop. It is most commonly used in jams and pies. According to the Hor...

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Back to the Ranch

Mr. Homegrown
Events
7 Comments
ers. The Ranch will provide much needed information on edible landscapes and food forestry, particularly for those of us in the southwest. Designed by Scott Kleinrock, the Ranch, with its combination of fruit trees, intensive vegetable plantings and California natives is already stunning–by next year it will be a paradise. The Ranch has a blog at http://huntingtonblogs.org/theranch/. Some highlights from the symposium after the jump: Auth...

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