The Survivor

January 4, 2007

We interrupt this dull series of articles about rainwater harvesting for important breaking news at our urban homestead–the development of the SurviveLA signature cocktail–the Survivor. For a long time we’ve cursed the previous owners of our compound for their useless, inedible landscaping. One of the plants they left us that we’ve lived with for all these years is an ornamental pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) that, while attractive, we had pr...

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

Mrs. Homegrown

July 19, 2013

Composting, Miscellaneous, Vermiculture

31 Comments

...eds into my bin at all. These things just linger and are hard to sift out. Harvesting the Castings Harvesting castings is the only hard part about keeping a bin–and it’s not even hard, it’s just somewhat less than convenient. No matter how long you rest one side of the bin, there will always be a few confused worms living in the finished castings. If you bag them up with the castings, they’ll die. So you have to sort out your feelings and responsi...

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A Prickly Situation

Mr. Homegrown

July 17, 2006

Food, Foraging

...or nopolitos use only the young leaves and extreme care must be taken when harvesting both leaves and fruit. Wear gloves when harvesting and preparing both the fruit and the nopolitos, as the plant contains thousands of almost invisible barbed spines. Thankfully these spines are easy to remove by dragging a knife across the skin or by using a vegetable peeler. Sometimes I just eat the fruit by cutting it in half, holding it with thick gloves and s...

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Olive Harvest 2021

Mr. Homegrown

September 9, 2021

Fermentation, Food, Fruit Trees, Gardening

17 Comments

...this year to prevent losing all the olives to the damned fly. We’ll see if harvesting this soon changes the quality of the final product but I read that commercial growers harvest at this early stage. Following UC Davis’ recipe for Sicilian cured olives I mixed up a brine consisting of: 8 cups water 3/4 cup pickling salt 1 cup vinegar This was more than enough brine to cover my 3 pounds of olives, which filled one 64 oz mason jar and a half filed...

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089 The New Wildcrafted Cuisine with Pascal Baudar

Mr. Homegrown

July 14, 2016

Food, Foraging, Podcasts

3 Comments

...We cover a lot of subjects in the podcast–everything from wild mustards to harvesting sugar from insects! Here’s just a few of the things we touch on: wild mustard weeds and invasives professional foraging wild beer Sacred and Herbal Beers by Stephen Harrod Buhner working with black mustard foraging in a drought in August in Southern California Pascal’s $350 energy bar Native American foraging practices Kat Anderson Tending the Wild foraging contr...

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