Mandrake!

...etic, and Buhner offers a beer recipe using a 1/2 once of the dried root. Seeds for mandrake, an endangered plant in many places, are available from Horizon Herbs, a company trying to revive cultivation of the plant. This summer season we’re surrounded by nightshade plants, tomatoes, ground cherries and eggplant. These common nightshade family members, as well as mandrake and the datura that the local Native Americans used for there spirit journey...

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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...

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A Self-Watering Container in a Pot

...reliably in a container. We have used them to successfully grow eggplants, tomatoes, collard greens and blueberries (note to the DEA: no cash crops at the Homegrown Revolution compound!). With our backyard looking fairly ugly this summer we’ve backpedaled on our earlier strident post about how we don’t care if our patio looks like a methamphetamine lab, and have dressed up one of our SWCs. Here’s how we did it: First we stuck our three gallon self...

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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...

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