Is Purslane the New Kale?

June 27, 2014

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...rslane (Portulaca oleracea) could soon be ready for its fifteen minutes of vegetable fame. We planted some this year in our summer vegetable garden and I’ve used it in a lot of salads this week. Purslane is a common weed in North America. We’d love to be able to forage it in the neighborhood but, for some reason, it only tends to appear in unappetizing locations: usually the gutter (I think it needs a bit more water than what falls naturally from...

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Parkway Plantings

Mr. Homegrown

October 3, 2006

Vegetable Gardening

1 Comment

...asses for agriculture in this country have taken all the flavor out of our vegetables. Rapa da Foglia senza Testa, i.e. rabe without a head. Yet another bitter vegetable, this is a kind of turnip green that looks kind of like broccoli rabe, except that you eat the leaves. A bit susceptible to bugs, but we had a successful crop last year. Carrots – Carota Pariser Market. This is a small round carrot that French folks apparently like. Around the wir...

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Going to Seed

Mrs. Homegrown

June 24, 2016

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Nature Awareness, Vegetable Gardening

14 Comments

...shrubs for kitchen floors. Popular opinion seems to believe our flower and vegetable gardens should be maintained like trophy rooms, like curio cases. Our mistake, of course, is thinking that everything is about us. That our yard, our garden, our little patch of land actually belongs to us and we have the right to maintain it exactly as we like. We might own it on paper, but we share it with hundreds, thousands, millions (if you want to get into s...

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Let’s Get Biointensive

Mr. Homegrown

October 16, 2009

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

11 Comments

.... But here at Homegrown Evolution we believe in telling the truth. Growing vegetables has its frustrations. The day after I planted our winter vegetable garden (we have two growing seasons here in Southern California), we had a freak October heatwave, causing a panicked run to the nursery to buy some shade cloth. This was followed by one of Mr. Homegrown’s notorious gardening meltdowns, dreaded by the very patient Mrs. Homegrown. We’ll keep our fi...

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Garden and Ego Destroyed by Skunks

Mr. Homegrown

November 1, 2012

Pests

8 Comments

...ure of the perpetrator: Skunk lessons learned the hard way: tightly secure vegetable beds with bird netting don’t do a half-assed job with the hoops that support the bird netting don’t think that “this year those skunks won’t go digging for grubs.” transplant instead of sowing directly (more work, but it just works better for me) lay compost on beds and let the skunks work it in with their high heels Here’s what the our new keyhole bed looks like...

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