End of Season Tomato Review

November 26, 2008

Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening

...tomato sauce and enough extra fruit to do some canning. Two hybrid cherry tomatoes we grew in self watering containers, Sun Gold and Sweet 100 also did well. The Romas have the additional benefit of being fusarium wilt and verticillium resistant. It may be organic gardening heresy to say this, but hybrid tomatoes such as Roma are the best varieties for beginning gardeners to grow due to their trouble free and disease resistant qualities. The down...

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Why Urban Farm?

Mr. Homegrown

June 10, 2007

Animals, Chickens

2 Comments

...r total up to four. Such are the cycles of life and death on the new urban homestead. Bryan Welch, who raises livestock and is also the publisher and editor of the always informative Mother Earth News, wrote an editorial in the February issue called “Why I Farm” in which he says, “There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the liv...

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Looking for the Union Label

Mr. Homegrown

September 12, 2007

Domesticus

3 Comments

...d 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 called Union House which carries a functional, if unexciting line of apparel. Unless hipsters take to golf shirts in an ironic fashion judo move, these offerings will never be cool like the domestically made clothes made by the union busting folks o...

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Feral Tomatoes on the Bayou

Mr. Homegrown

February 29, 2008

Food, Foraging

5 Comments

...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 sprouted the seeds and the result is the plant below. Back with more f...

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How’s that Tomato Grafting Project Going?

Mr. Homegrown

July 21, 2016

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

4 Comments

...ssity. We haven’t had the sort of soil problems that might require grafted tomatoes but I thought it would be fun to try. To graft tomatoes you grow a hardy root stock (I chose Maxifort) and the tomatoes you want to graft them on to. You then make the graft and secure it with a grafting clip. For the grafting process I used the directions in the following video from Cornell University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08YfqCpL3po&index=66&list=FLsd...

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