Search Results for: label/least favorite plant

424 results

Yucca!

Mr. Homegrown
Foraging
1 Comment
...of America’s first camping trip. Thanks again to the folks at C.I.C.L.E. for putting it together and this week SurviveLA will review a few of the highlights of the trip starting with the many uses of the wondrous yucca plant. We were tipped off to the yucca thanks to Christopher Nyerges‘ wild food hike that he led when he met up with the Bike Scouts on Sunday. Nyerges showed us how to weave rope using the fibers of the yucca plant, a...

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Get Off Your Ass and Plant a Survival Garden!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
...nt to keep a steady stream of produce on the table. In general, remember that winter here is the best time for most crops with the summer reserved for stuff that can take the heat like tomatoes and basil. So get out there and plant your own food and remember our rule here around the Homegrown Evolution homestead: if you gotta water it you gotta be able to eat it....

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A Prickly Situation

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
RLeave a comment
Today’s post is for clueless white folks as our hermanos y hermanas already know this shit. As we’ve suggested before the rule with landscaping at the Homegrown Evolution compound is, if you gotta water it you gotta be able to eat it. But there are a few miracle plants, well adapted to Southern California’s climate, that are both edible and don’t need watering. One of the most versatile is the prickly pear cactus, of whi...

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Harvesting and Drying Calendula

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Calendula series, Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, How-to
32 Comments
...olive oil and beeswax. When to harvest:  Start harvesting your Calendula as soon as the first flush of flowers is in full bloom. Don’t try to “save” the flowers. The more you harvest, the more flowers each plant will put out.  After the first cutting, you can probably return to harvest more every 3 days or so. The ideal time to harvest is in the morning, before it gets warm, but after the dew dries. You want them all fresh an...

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What Are Your Favorite Compost Materials?

Mr. Homegrown
Composting
20 Comments
Root Simple’s new composting game for your Xbox! I wish I could source compost pile materials from our yard. But lead and zinc contamination in our soil make that a dodgy proposition without doing a lot of expensive lab tests. And I never seem to have enough materials even for our modest vegetable garden. So in the past I’ve used: horse bedding chicken manure from our own chickens alfalfa hay (kinda spendy these days) str...

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A Favorite Tool: Canning Funnel

Mrs. Homegrown
Tools
9 Comments
I heart my funnel Mrs. Homegrown here: If you are a home canner, you probably already have one of these and know how useful they are. If you don’t can, you might never have seen one before. I hadn’t before we started canning–and I don’t know how I lived so long without one. See, a canning funnel is just a wide mouthed funnel made to fit the mouths of canning jars. It allows you to quickly and efficiently ladle up ho...

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Our favorite way to cook zucchini

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
26 Comments
...an you think you can eat. The central idea here is to cook off all that water. This can’t be emphasized enough. That’s what makes this dish taste good. The zucchini will release a lot of water as it cooks–at least ours does, because it’s very fresh. Older zucchini may be more dry. So keep it simmering at a good clip, stirring occasionally, until the water bubbles off. Saute until there’s no water pooling at the bott...

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One of our favorite activities: Depaving

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening
7 Comments
Taking out concrete with a sledgehammer may not be everyone’s idea of a great time, but believe me, Erik is having a great time in this picture. Any opportunity to get rid of a few feet of ugly concrete or asphalt,  and replace it with soil and plants, is not an opportunity to be missed. Depaving increases growing room for green things and it also gives more points of access for rain to enter the ground and renew the water tables–ra...

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Interview With Apartment Gardener Helen Kim

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbs
1 Comment
...to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. Helen graciously sat down for an email interview to talk about her beautiful and useful garden: HOMEGROWN EVOLUTION: What’s your advice to folks who would like to try growing plants in an apartment windowsill? HELEN KIM: Well, since I didn’t start with any particular plant knowledge or skills (just a feeling that it would be lovely to have living things around my apartment–besides my...

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The End of California Citrus?

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Gardening, Pests
17 Comments
...ases afflicting citrus in the Sunshine State. Now California growers are panicking with the appearance of the psylid. So far the psylids found in California do not carry HLB. However, according to an article in the Journal of Plant Pathology (pdf), HLB inevitably follows the citrus psylid within a few years. In several ways HLB resembles Pierce’s disease which has killed most of my grape vines and basically made growing table or wine grapes...

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