Search Results for: label/vegetable%20gardening/page/4/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

635 results

How to Make Stock

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Food, How-to
17 Comments
...by adding a spoonful of soy sauce. Similarly, you can pre-roast your stock vegetables in the oven — or better, make stock out of leftover roasted vegetables. Roasting really brings out nice meaty flavors in a veg stock. Add the roasted veggies to water and proceed as above. Frankly, I only do either of these things for special occasions, when I’m pulling out all the stops. Simple veg stock is my workhorse around the kitchen. Meat and Fish Stocks I...

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Is Purslane the New Kale?

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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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Going to Seed

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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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The Mulch Robs Nitrogen Myth

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Gardening
10 Comments
...lches such as gravel. I sometimes get asked what kind of mulch to use in a vegetable garden. I use straw since it’s inexpensive and easy to clean up at the end of the summer growing season. I wouldn’t use wood chips on vegetable or other annuals since they might get churned into the soil even though I don’t ever till or double dig. Wood chips are for perennials. Now, my Root Simple friends, go forth and tell people that mulch does not rob the soil...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

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Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
10 Comments
...riorities right now, straw bales make for an easy way to grow a few summer vegetables with a high chance of success. When figuring out where and how to plant a vegetable garden we’ve got to include both biological and social considerations, i.e. we’ve have to consider both plants and people. If you’ve got more space, time to compost and healthy soil roll with that. If you’re in an apartment grow some herbs in a pot on your windowsill. If you’re a...

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