Kale, Pomegranate and Persimmon Salad

November 30, 2009

Homegrown Neighbor here:

Season’s Eatings.

I made this salad for a party recently and again for Thanksgiving. I had so many people asking for the recipe, I figured I might as well share it with everyone. I love the deep green of the kale with the bright orange of the persimmons. The colors feel very festive and seasonal. Kale may not be a vegetable you think about eating raw. If so, this salad will change your mind. All of a sudden, I can’t eat enough raw kale.

I feel fantastic after loading up on a big bowl.

The recipe:

1 bunch black kale (also called Tuscan or dinosaur kale)
2 medium sized fuyu persimmons
1/2 cup pomegranate seeds

For the dressing:
1 tablespoon olive or grapeseed oil
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon, a dash of Bragg’s Liquid Aminos. You can use soy sauce or tamari, but I think Bragg’s is best.
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

Wash and chop kale. Cut the tops off of the persimmons and cut into chunks, about 1/2″ cubes. To seed the pomegranate, place it in a bowl of water and cut in half. Then proceed to remove the seeds. This takes the mess out of the pomegranate. If you remove the seeds underwater, you never get stains on your clothes. The seeds float to the bottom and the white pithy part floats. Mix everything together in one big bowl, serve and enjoy.

Variations: You can always use apples instead of persimmons for that slightly sweet crunch. Shredded carrot

could also be nice and colorful. Adding a tablespoon of either tahini or peanut butter to the dressing adds flavor and makes it creamier. But if you are doing

the tahini or peanut butter dressing, I recommend mixing the dressing in a jar first so that everything

melds together. A little dash of mustard helps emulsify the dressing.

Basil all winter long

Mrs. Homegrown

November 27, 2009

Herbs

9 Comments

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Basil is a summer plant. When the nights get cold, basil turns unhappy. It yellows and loses flavor. Here in LA that doesn’t happen until quite late in the year. Erik just pulled out our summer basil a couple of days ago to make room for winter plants. I’m replacing it–in a culinary sense–with Italian parsley, which loves cool weather, but hates the heat. It seems our gardening year swings between the basil and parsley poles.

I made the last of our basil into basil cubes, which is my favorite way of preserving it. Just wash and coarsely chop your basil leaves and shove them into an ice cube tray, so that there’s a spoonful of basil in every cube. Cover with water and freeze. Pop them out of the trays and transfer them to a ziplock freezer bag. Throughout the winter, whenever you want a little fresh basil flavor, all you have to do is grab a few cubes. Toss the cubes straight into sauces, or let them melt to retrieve the leaves alone to use for toppings, salad &etc.

Happy Thanksgiving, Now Go Buy Something

Mr. Homegrown

November 26, 2009

Miscellaneous

1 Comment

We’re kidding. Well, sort of. Hopefully you’ll negotiate a truce with your family today to forgo expensive and wasteful holiday gift giving. Like us, you probably are also heavy users of the public library. But just in case you need to find the right gift for the fanatical urban homesteader in your life we’ve opened a Homegrown Evolution Amazon Store which contains books and tools that we actually own and use around our humble compound. Purchases made through the store and even other items you click through to will help support this website.

A few items in I’d like to call attention to:

Novella Carpenter’s Farm City
Carpenter is a phenomenal writer and anyone who’s involved in the activities profiled on this blog will love this book. The concluding section, where Carpenter describes raising two enormous pigs in the ghetto is both amusing and profound.

John Jeavons How To Grow More Vegetables
It’s the vegetable gardening bible around here. Since we started using Jeavons’ methods this fall I’ve noticed a significant improvement in the health of our garden. The only book on vegetables you need to own.

Haws Watering Can
Jeavons turned me on to this. The can produces a gentle spray that is perfect for watering flats of seedlings. I can’t believe I lived without this thing. It’s expensive but worth it.

The Urban Homestead
And, of course, there’s our own book. If you order directly from us on the right side of this page, we make a few more pennies then when you buy on Amazon. But either way, pick up a copy for the whole family! Help keep our doberman in kibble!

Row Covers in a Warm Climate

Mr. Homegrown

November 25, 2009

Composting, Gardening, Tools, Vegetable Gardening

2 Comments

The aftermath of a skunk rampage.

Here’s an unintended organic gardening chain of events:

1. Scoop up multiple trash bags full of fruit scraps from Fallen Fruit’s jam making event at Machine Project.

2. Add this large bounty of organic material to the compost pile.

3. Watch as a bunch of beetle larvae hatch and devour the fruit and other goodies in the compost pile.

4. Sift compost and feed most of the larvae to a happy flock of hens.

5. Add compost to the vegetable garden.

6. Plant seedlings.

7. Wake up the next morning to find out that skunks have spent the night rampaging through the vegetable beds in search of the remaining grubs. Yell in frustration at the sight of all the uprooted seedlings that took a month to grow in flats.

Now I knew that skunks were a problem at our place, and I had covered the beds each night with some spare shade cloth to keep them out. But on this particular evening I had forgotten to cover the beds. Pepé le Peu had destroyed a month’s worth of work.

Setting about to find a solution, I considered everything from high powered weapons to peeing off the front porch to spreading batches of compost for the hens to pick through. Not wanting a visit from the LAPD, I settled on floating row covers, a light fabric that is used to exclude pests and protect plants from frost. Row covers would also take care of another persistent problem, cabbage worms. But here in USDA zone 10, where we have only occasional frosts, row covers have the potential to make growing conditions too warm. Thankfully I was able to get a roll of an extremely light row cover material called Agribon 15. Agribon makes a range of row covers in varying thicknesses. Agribon 15 is the lightest and is used mainly to exclude pesky insects. It has also worked with the skunks, who seem unwilling to poke through the flimsy fabric. Those of you in colder places should use a heavier cover to retain more heat.

I drilled holes in the corners of the beds and bent some scrap PVC pipe to create hoops to hold the row cloth above the plants. Agribon is so light that you can just put it on top of many plants without hoops.

Now I can sleep at night knowing that my beds are locked down in a kind of “vegetable Guantanamo”.

Johnny’s Seeds sells Agribon 15 in 250 foot rolls for $45. Seeds of Change sells it in 5o foot lengths for $26. It would make sense for most urban homesteaders go in with a few friends on a roll.

Watch a video on how to install row covers at Johnny’s Seeds.

Compost Field Trip

Homegrown Neighbor

November 24, 2009

Composting

9 Comments

Homegrown Neighbor Here:

I recently had the opportunity to tour an industrial scale composting operation. I am a huge compost geek so I was pretty excited. I’ve seen a lot of piles in my day, but nothing like this. This facility, Community Recycling (a division of Crown Disposal), processes food scraps and organic wastes from most of the major grocery store chains in Southern California. They also collect food scraps from restaurants and other food vendors in the region as well as operate a recycling facility for metals, plastics, wood, paper, yard trimmings and anything else they can find a market for or a way to keep out of the landfill. I must say it was pretty impressive. But the most exciting part of course was the compost.

There were literally mountains of compost called windrows in rows perhaps twenty feet high by several hundred feet long. It’s a large scale operation with not just one windrow but dozens of them. And this is all stuff that otherwise would end up in landfills. Of course we should be composting all of our organic wastes close to home, but the sad truth is that a lot of this lovely organic material gets thrown away instead of returned to the earth. So I am glad that enterprises such as this exist.

When vegetables are going to go bad at the grocery store, they get tossed in a bin bound for these vast fields of degrading organic matter. The interesting part is that they get tossed in, plastic and all. There are bagged carrots, bagged salad mixes, plastic wrapped heads of cauliflower, all together. The compost windrows are just littered with plastic as you can see. Nothing like my backyard compost, where I would never allow any plastic or so much as a stray rubber band. On a commercial scale, they find it easier to sort the plastic out at the end of the composting process. Just how they do that, they won’t say–apparently it’s proprietary. But we got to drive around the hundreds of acres of compost and see the process for ourselves, start to finish. [Mr. Homegrown here: plastic combined with organics is one of the big problems in the world of municipal waste.]

The food waste is blended with wood chips or wood ‘fines’ as needed. Huge windrow machines straddle and churn the piles. They look like something out of Star Wars. Several months later the finished compost is sold to farmers. Community Recycling is a totally vertically integrated operation so of course they farm a little too–organic almonds, some row crops and some forage crops. That way, if they have too much compost on their hands at one time, they can always put it on their own land. The soil looked pretty good to me. I got to traipse around and get my hands in the earth. They also raise wild turkeys and other native birds to be released into the wild. It is part of a habitat and wildlife restoration project they are involved in.

This was better than any amusement park I’ve ever been too. I mean, they have compost, weird looking wild animals- yes, turkeys are very weird looking, organic almonds, a recycling facility and did I mention the mountains of compost? I’m pictured below, the happy queen of the compost heap.