Straw Bale Garden Tour Part II

August 21, 2013

Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening, Videos

...video we take a tour of our straw bale garden as it appears this week. The vegetables varieties you see growing are Tromboncino squash, Lunga di Napoli squash (growing up into a native bush), Matt’s Wild Cherry tomato, Celebrity tomato, eggplant and Swiss chard. And just to take down my smugness a notch I also included a shot of an unsuccessful cucumber plant. Other than the cucumber, though, this is one of the most productive vegetable gardens I’...

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Delicious Cauliflower

Mrs. Homegrown

August 26, 2013

Food, Recipes

8 Comments

For me, cauliflower is a vegetable which eludes inspiration. I eat it raw. I roast it. I’ve made soup with it once or twice. That’s about the sum of my historic use of cauliflower. Now, everything has changed. I’ve found a recipe for cauliflower which I love. It comes from a book called Vegetarian Dishes from the Middle East, by Arto der Haroutunian. I think I’ve mentioned it before. It’s a good, reliable book. Lately I’ve been on a deep Middle E...

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Sweet Potatoes for Breakfast

Mrs. Homegrown

September 11, 2013

Food

31 Comments

...ar bear liver (should you have that golden opportunity), but the worst the vegetable form can do is turn you vaguely orange ( a revertible condition) and eating 1 sweet potato a day is not going to do that. Incidentally, fat makes some of sweet potato’s nutrients more accessible, so you have every excuse now to eat those babies with butter, or roast them in oil. 4) I like getting this big hit of nutrition first thing in the morning. It’s sort of l...

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Urban Homesteading and Homeowners Associations

Mr. Homegrown

October 4, 2013

Thoughtstylings

19 Comments

...ed restrictions tend to forbid things like keeping chickens and front yard vegetable gardens. You can even get in trouble for a laundry line. I’m curious to hear from readers who live in an HOAs. Did you get into urban homesteading before or after moving to an HOA? Have you ever gotten in trouble? What did you do about it? Do the benefits of living in an HOA outweigh the restrictions? And there are less restrictive HOAs. I once met a couple who li...

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Have We Reached Peak Kale? Franchi’s Cavolo Laciniato “Galega De Folhas Lisas”

Mr. Homegrown

November 6, 2013

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

8 Comments

...s and fancy city folks like us are losing sleep worrying what the next hip vegetable will be. I have a proposal. Let’s keep with the kale for awhile longer. I propose a Franchi kale “Galega De Folhas Lisas” as the new big thing. Translated, the variety name is something like “Galacian smooth leaf.” To add to the confusion I get the feeling that Italians don’t distinguish between kale and collards—what we call collards they consider just a smooth l...

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