Search Results for: label/tomatoes

111 results

Waiting for our tomatoes/Tomatoland

Mrs. Homegrown
Reviews, Thoughtstylings, Tomatoes
17 Comments
grow! grow faster! Mrs. Homegrown here: Via Boing Boing, I found this excerpt on Onearth Magazine’s website, from a new book called Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook, which is apparently a document of all the indignities suffered by the industrial tomato–the tomato that sits, bright red, useless and flavorless, on store shelves year round, country-wide. Here at the Root Simple compound, we choose to eat tomatoes seasonally̵...

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So-So Tomatoes Become Excellent When Dried

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Food, Solar
15 Comments
As we reported earlier, we weren’t thrilled with our cherry tomato choice this summer. They were just plain dull. They were also rather large for a cherry, more like mini-plum tomatoes, which made them awkward for salads. But they were healthy plants, and very, very prolific. In situations like this it is good to remember that tomatoes which don’t taste good off the bush often cook or dry well. The ratio of skin and seeds to pulp in...

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Dookie in the Tomatoes

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening
14 Comments
Our first tomatoes of the season are just beginning to ripen, coinciding nicely with the multi-state cow poo in the roma scare. Allow me to speculate wildly about the cause of the current epidemic, tracing the cause step by step from the beginning: 1. We begin not with the tomato farm, but instead with manure from that wonder of industrialized agriculture, the concentrated feed lot, where thousands of cattle stew in their own filth. Immunosuppr...

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Remember to Label Those Jars!

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation
10 Comments
“Label, label, label!” This was one of the most important lessons I learned in my Master Food Preserver training. You’ll note, from the jars above, that I’m not very good about this. When were those jars canned and what’s in them? I have no idea. They were probably the result of some late night canning frenzy two years ago. At the time I probably thought to myself, “I’ll label them in the morning.”...

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Scrambled Eggs, Tomatoes and Bulgar

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
4 Comments
...ing a cool beer. It’s basically a simple scramble made substantial with bulgar wheat (aka burghul). See notes below for more on this ingredient. Havgtov Tzavar (burghul with eggs) 1 onion, finely choppedAbout 1 pound of tomatoes, either canned or fresh ones which have been blanched, peeled and chopped 4 ounces of fine bulgar wheat (the package may read #1/fine) (aka burghul)*6 eggsSpring/green onions for garnish, choppedoil and/or butter fo...

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Tomatoes in December

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Tomatoes
8 Comments
It ain’t pretty but I’m not complaining. Note to self: the tomatoes that sprout on their own are always the healthiest. The cherry tomato above has reseeded itself for at least 12 years. Sometimes its offspring survive the winter and grow as a perennial. Our climate sort of permits this but occasionally a cold night will kill tomatoes off. And each year the fruit declines in quality. This summer I transplanted two tomato se...

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End of Season Tomato Review

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
7 Comments
Homegrown Evolution had ambitious plans to review each and every tomato variety out of the garden this year, but alas, we fell behind in our bloggulating duties and planted way too many tomatoes. So here, as “winter” appears in Southern California (it’s raining, that’s how you tell), we’ll review what worked and what didn’t work. The tastiest tomato award goes to the Pineapple variety pictured above. Not only...

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Looking for the Union Label

Mr. Homegrown
Domesticus
3 Comments
We’ve got a bad case of Ohrwurm, a German expression translated as “earworm” and used to describe a song stuck in your head. Our earworm came after a search for union made socks and underwear on the internets recalled a highly catchy ad jingle from the roller disco era, “Look for the Union Label” (youngsters can watch it on youtube here). We looked for the union label and we were surprised to find it via a company c...

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Feral Tomatoes on the Bayou

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
5 Comments
While walking along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, just next to a concrete plant and under a bridge we stumbled on some feral tomatoes. We theorized that some fast food meal pitched in the gutter found it’s way into this meandering, heavily industrialized waterway. The tomatoes separated from the cheeseburger, floated to the surface of the water and were deposited on the muddy banks of the bayou. Houston’s hot and humid climate sprou...

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How to Stake Tomatoes

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, How-to, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
5 Comments
Our tomato staking method around the Homegrown Evolution compound is simple and lazy. We plant our tomatoes and then surround them with rolled up concrete reinforcing wire. Normally used to reinforce concrete slabs, reinforcing wire comes in 3 1/2′ by 7′ sections. We use a circular saw with a metal blade on it to cut off the bottom rung, so as to leave spiky wires with which to stick the reinforcing wire tubes into the ground, but th...

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