Search Results for: label/least favorite plant/2011/04/making-it

884 results

Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

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Food, Recipes
15 Comments
...r fruit has a leather-like consistency, enjoy. You swallow the hard seeds, making prickly pear fruit somewhat an acquired taste for some. Chumacero also mentioned that the young pads, “nopalitos” in Spanish, can also be dried for later use. A note to the permaculturalists out there. It’s worth emphasizing that the prickly pear cactus, Opuntia ficus-indica, in my personal experience, is the single most productive plant in our small lot. It’s also t...

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Farm in a Box

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Aquaculture, Preparedness
11 Comments
...a combined fish tank/planter box. Waste from the fish circulates into the planter box via a pump to provide fertilizer for the plants as well as removing nitrogen and ammonia from the water. From the Earth Solutions website: “By integrating fish with vegetables, naturally balanced aquatic ecosystems are established making it unnecessary to add fertilizer, chemicals or remove nitrogen rich water. As in nature, plants, fish and oxygen loving bacter...

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Compostable Holiday Decor

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Design
3 Comments
...took about a half hour to make, and I made it more for the pleasure of the making than anything else. It is worth remembering that you can throw together a wreath or swag or centerpiece out of whatever fresh plant matter you can find, and it will look fresh for the rest of the day. It’s really nice to have fresh, fragrant greenery on the walls and tables for parties. Here’s a thoughtstyling for you: maybe holiday decor should be as compost-able as...

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Jujube and Goji Fever

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Food, Gardening
11 Comments
...$14 for a pound of dried berries at Whole Foods. What attracted us to the plant is its alleged tolerance to living in proximity to black walnut trees, notorious for producing their own herbicides. We ended up planting them elsewhere in the yard, since our black walnut area is a bit too shady, and we’ll report back on how they do. Supposedly the leaves are edible as well, for those of you keeping score on the alternate uses of fruits and vegetable...

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Grow the Soil

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Gardening
3 Comments
...n the right a spindly, nitrogen starved specimen of the same variety of eggplant, planted at the same time, in our parkway garden. The container eggplant on the left is larger, has greener leaves and is obviously more healthy. The stunted eggplant on the right is the victim of depleted soil. There’s some irony here. With our book release and press folks coming around to see things we’ve been doing too much planting and not paying enough attention...

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