Saturday Linkages: A Boat Couch and Chickens in the News

...about house fire http://www.weau.com/home/headlines VW Chicken Coop Scale Model http://www.dudecraft.com/2012/12/vw-chicken-coop-scale-model.html … Gardening What a Little Paint Can Do In Your Garden | Garden Rant http://gardenrant.com/2012/12/what-a-little-paint-can-do.html … For these links and more, follow Root Simple on Twitter: Follow @rootsimple...

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What To Do With Old Vegetable Seeds

...semi-wild vegetable garden: Include nitrogen fixers (in my case some clover seeds) Use daikon and other radishes to break up hard soil Sow before weeds emerge Scott Kleinrock has used the same strategy at the Huntington Gardens. Here’s what his semi-wild vegetable garden, growing in the understory of some small fruit trees, looked like in January of this year: And there you have it–vegetable gardening with a fraction of the work....

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Rapini is the New Broccoli

...got more aphids than produce. Plus broccoli takes up a lot of room in the garden for a very small return, which is why I’ve switched to rapini instead. Rapini, according to Wikipedia, is known under a confusing jumble of names including broccoli rabe, broccoli raab, broccoletti, saag, broccoli di rape, cime di rapa, rappi, friarielli, and grelos. It’s a member of the brassica family and is closely related to the turnip. And, unlike most vegetable...

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That ain’t a bowl full of larvae, it’s crosne!

...would be as hard to clean as Jerusalem artichoke, but a few blasts of the garden hose took off most of the dirt. French folks cook crosne in butter. I decided to pickle them in white vinegar using a recipe for Jerusalem artichoke. The recipe I used was a little too heavy on the mustard, otherwise I’d pass it on. The addition of some tumeric gave the pickles an appealing yellow color. I’ve been tossing them into salads to the horror of Mrs. Homegr...

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Thyrsus: the new hipster accessory

...an places. One of the centerpieces of the show, a large fresco depicting a garden, includes many familiar plants: chamomile, oleander (who knew oleander existed before freeways!), strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo) and date palms. But what kept capturing my eye in multiple pieces, was a ceremonial stick carried in Bacchic processions called a thyrsus. Consisting of a stalk of giant fennel topped with a pine cone, occasionally accessorized with a grap...

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