How to Size a Breakfast Nook Table

...ut?” Readers of this blog have more important concerns such as how to keep tomatoes alive or how to justify some ridiculously complex project such as liming your own corn for homemade masa or distilling your own essential oils whilst your household comrades complain about the tardiness of dinner. Our long list of unsolvable problems at the Root Simple compound includes such things as bad posture, contaminated soils, middle age paunch and, of cours...

Read…

Sourdough, Preserves, Barbeque Sauce and Chutney!

...oks A Catering Company to offer a special cooking class on Sunday September 13th at 2 p.m in Los Angeles. We’ll demonstrate how to make sourdough bread and Jennie will cook up a batch of her mouthwatering chutney, barbecue sauce and more. Here’s the 411: “Hang out and cook with the Urban Pioneers who created an oasis in So Cal where they grow their own food, bake their own bread and brew their own Hooch. We’ll put up preserves, barbecue sauce and...

Read…

On Sharpening Tools

...the finer points of metallurgy. But one need not get lost in the details. Just take a class (the one I took was at a Rockler store) and practice. That’s what I did and now our knives cut tomatoes, our garage is full of sharp chisels and all I can think about is the ontology of bevel angles and the teleology of chisel metallurgy. Save...

Read…

Growing Watermelons

...us 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 drip irrigation make sure that the emitters extend in a ring around the roots. Putting an emitter at the stem of the plant, as we did, does not adequately wat...

Read…

The Perfect Crisis Vegetable: Prickly Pear Cactus

...h onions. You can also just chop the pads and eat them raw in a salsa with tomatoes, onions and hot peppers. Some other resources from our blog for what to do with prickly pear fruit: A prickly pear fruit cocktail Juicing prickly pear fruit Prickly pear jam recipe If you’re not in our warm and dry-ish region a good resource for other edible perennials is Eric Toensmeier’s book Edible Perennial Vegetable Gardening. Can’t grow prickly pear? Tell us...

Read…