Search Results for: label/tomatoes

112 results

A Fast Bean Friday: Khichdi

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food, Recipes
6 Comments
...can add as you please. Veggies: This is your chance to use up whatever you have in your fridge, or those singleton veggies coming in from the garden, anything from chopped greens to peas to cauliflower…anything at all. Tomatoes, fresh or canned, are always a good addition. Pre-cooked, leftover vegetables would be fine, too. Chop it all up smallish. If you add lots of veggies, particularly the drier, root vegetable types, you’d want t...

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Cornmeal Zucchini Pancakes

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
9 Comments
...or yellow summer squash 3 tablespoons yellow bell pepper, diced fine (we skipped this) 3 tablespoons finely chopped onion Salsa for serving, homemade or store-bought, optional.  (We just chopped up some red onion and cherry tomatoes and called it salsa, but I think a fruity salsa (e.g. mango) would be really good with this.) In a big bowl fork together the dry ingredients (the first list). In a smaller bowl mix the wet ingredients (the second...

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A garden that looks like a meth amphetamine lab

Mr. Homegrown
Self Watering Containers
1 Comment
...d replace it with a yuppie entertaining deck but instead we’re growing food on it. We built some self-watering containers (for instructions on how to do this see our earlier post) and we’re growing collard greens, tomatoes and southern highbush blueberries, so far with great success. It looks like a meth amphetamine lab. But since it provides tasty fresh food, who give a damn?...

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How To Dry Food With the Sun

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation, How-to, Preparedness, Solar
5 Comments
...dry fruit. Again, if you’ve used something like this, please comment. Beware of Bugs One drawback to outdoor drying is that you can often get infestations of flies and pantry moths. We’ve lost a lot of dehydrated tomatoes this way even though our Appalachian dryer has screens. I’ve even lost batches I’ve done in an electric dehydrator inside. Thankfully it’s easy to kill larvae by sticking your dried food in the fre...

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Garden Edibles

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
3 Comments
...you gotta grow your own. Coming soon (again, as soon as book #2 is done), we’ll list what we grew this winter and what we plan on growing this summer. From Garden Edibles, this summer, we’re planting San Marzano 2 tomatoes and Rosso Dolce Da Appendere peppers. We always have some San Marzanos growing because they are so damn reliable. But we’re particularly excited about the peppers. And the tomato at left? It’s been rescu...

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Growing Watermelons

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
9 Comments
...t early varieties of most vegetables simply because there is less time for bad things to happen. 3. Watermelon is a living mulch. Watermelon, an enormous vine, makes an excellent living mulch, snaking, as it does, amongst our tomatoes and okra. I’ve laid down a layer of straw as mulch, but the watermelon adds a little more to the shade and water retention effort. 4. Irrigating watermelons. Watermelons have large root systems and if you use...

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A Bustle In Your Hedgerow: California Natives for your Vegetable Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Native Plants, Pests
8 Comments
Coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) photo by Art Shapiro I’ve always been suspicious of some of the popular companion planting advice of the sort dispensed in old books like Carrots Love Tomatoes. From what I understand research just hasn’t proven a lot of the relationships these sorts of books tout. What makes intuitive sense to me, however, is that biodiversity in in a garden can create habitat for beneficial insects and bi...

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Poison in the Compost

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
...lants or severely stunt their production, costing gardeners money and time. What do you need to know about contaminated compost? Affected plants show signs of curled, cupped leaves, wilting new growth and poor germination in tomatoes, peas, beans, lettuce and other garden crops. The chemical residues causing the problem can be present in grass clippings, in manure of livestock that has eaten sprayed plant matter or in compost made from contamina...

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Pimp My Cold Frame

Mr. Homegrown
Design, Gardening, Seeds
19 Comments
While the climate here in Los Angeles is exceedingly mild–it rarely gets much below freezing–springtime can, some years, be too cold to get good germination of summer vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers. This was the case in 2010 when I was not able to get a single tomato seed to germinate until late May. To head off another seedling crisis I built a simple cold frame. In order to prevent the cold frame from becoming a solar...

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