Why it’s Better to Pressure Can Tomatoes

October 30, 2014

Food, Food Preservation, Gardening, Tomatoes

...ed and less acidic foods that need to be canned in a pressure canner. Most fruits have a lower, i.e. more acidic pH and can be water bath canned. Tomatoes, on the other hand, are often near the 4.6 pH level and USDA tested recipes will call for adding either bottled lemon juice or citric acid (I prefer citric acid as the taste is more neutral). I used to think that this issue was because different tomato varieties vary in their acid content. It tu...

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A Plea for Plastic Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown

September 22, 2014

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

A supplier’s offerings of fake fruits and vegetables in Japan. We get a lot of good spam emails at Root Simple. This one, which came in last week, is one of my favorites: Hello, I work for a TV show in New York and we are in need of several artificial vegetables and vegetable plants. Please let me know if you carry any of the following: 1. Purple Bulb Shaped Eggplants and Eggplant plants 2. Green and yellow squash (zucchini) 3. Cucumbers 4. Red H...

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Lord of the Flies Inspired Bike Rack

Homegrown Neighbor

May 18, 2009

Bikes

3 Comments

...bviously 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

February 4, 2013

Food, Food Preservation, How-to

21 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 entitled “How t...

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There is Something Beyond the Straw Bale

Mr. Homegrown

May 31, 2019

Fruit Trees, Garden Design, Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

2 Comments

...icial wildlife. We’re also fans of hardy and climate appropriate perennial fruits and vegetables–beyond that solitary straw bale we have a lot of edible perennial plants and a bunch of work to do to straighten out the yard after years of other priorities. Site of future seasonal rain garden. Towards that end, our landscaper, Laramee Haynes and crew are coming next week to clean things up, install a kind of seasonal rain garden fed by a downspout,...

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