Parkway Plantings

October 3, 2006

...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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Food Storage Revisited

Mr. Homegrown

November 2, 2018

Domesticus, Tidying up

8 Comments

.... I should also clarify that if you live out in the country and have a big vegetable garden you will need a larger pantry or basement. We are urban dwellers with, at best, a tiny vegetable garden (which has been neglected this year while I work on the house). That said there are some big differences between the kitchens of the 1920s and the kitchens of today that present new challenges. Some of those changes: We have a lot more kitchen gadgets and...

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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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Is Purslane the New Kale?

Mr. Homegrown

June 27, 2014

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

29 Comments

...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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Direct Seeding vs. Transplants

Mr. Homegrown

May 21, 2014

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

34 Comments

...Willits a few years back. Jeavons transplants everything. One of the best vegetable gardens I ever grew was done following his instructions to the letter. But I’m not big on double digging, nor do I look forward to the twice a year transplanting chores. Look what’s growing in the new raised beds–nada! This year I tried to direct sow the summer garden instead of growing trays of seedlings and I have to say I’m not getting good results. A week of t...

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