Physalis pruinosa a.k.a. “Ground Cherry”

April 30, 2007

...in the world but is not considered an important crop. It is most commonly used in jams and pies. According to the Horticulture department of Purdue University, In England, the cape gooseberry was first reported in 1774. Since that time, it has been grown there in a small way in home gardens, and after World War II was canned commercially to a limited extent. Despite this background, early in 1952, the Stanford Nursery, of Sussex, announced the “C...

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A Parvati Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown

March 24, 2008

Solar

4 Comments

...nd affixed the aluminum foil with spray glue. For our first pot of rice we used a black enamel pot to better absorb the heat of the sun’s rays, and wrapped it in a roasting bag to increase the efficiency of the cooker. A five gallon bucket made a convenient stand and did not have to be rotated in the two hours it took to cook the rice. Longer cooking times would require re-aiming the cooker as the sun moves across the sky. Temperature in the pot q...

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Spent Grain Bread–We Brew Econo

Mr. Homegrown

February 18, 2008

Miscellaneous

4 Comments

...sing the spent grains, the leftover malted barley and crystal malt that we used in the beer recipe, which are strained out before the beer is put away to ferment, as a flavoring for our wild yeast bread (recipe and instructions for making that bread here—we added 4.5 ounces of the spent grains to the dough–and we just threw them in whole without grinding them up as some folks on the internets suggest). The rich, smoky taste and the dark color thes...

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Homegrown Evolution Visits the Los Angeles County Fair

Mr. Homegrown

September 30, 2008

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...he 4-H clubs and in comes the corporate sponsors. Taking the place of what used to be livestock competitions was a farm animal exhibition called “Fair View Farms” sponsored by McDonald’s. Do I need to comment on the irony of that bit of branding? Fair View Farms featured bleak panoramas, such as this large pen of pigs with, oddly, a bunch of ordinary roosters pecking around. What happened to all the different animal breeds I remember from the San...

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Fabulous Postcards from HenCam

Mrs. Homegrown

October 2, 2013

Animals, Reviews

...collection, but it seems kitties were a little too sly for early cameras, making good pictures (as opposed to cat-shaped blurs) hard to find.) She tells us she spent two years collecting pictures for these collections, searching everywhere, from flea markets to eBay, parsing through thousands of photos. Her favorites are collected in books of 30. She picked good ones. Every card tells the story, and most of them leave me with questions, too. Also...

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