Search Results for: label/medicinal plants/page/4/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

771 results

A Celebration of Craft

Avatar photo
Bread, Food, Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
...t. A third person I met at the festival is Alice Doyle, owner of Log House Plants a wholesale nursery in Eugene Oregon. In her lecture she went alphabetically through a list of edible plants she thought were interesting. By the end of the hour, I think she reached the letter “J.” I wished we could have had a few more hours to get to “Z.” And this is another quality of the craftsperson, a selfless enthusiasm that can turn a list of vegetables into...

Read…

My Big Fat Greek Squash

Avatar photo
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
13 Comments
...visit my mom, her Greek neighbor pops over the fence to offer me seeds and plants. He visits Greece each summer and comes back with seeds for plants whose names he can’t translate into English. As a result I always have a few mystery Greek vegetables growing in the garden. This spring he gave me a squash seedling he had propagated. It grew into a massive vine and produced two winter squashes whose weight exceeded the capacity of my kitchen scale....

Read…

Mandrake!

Avatar photo
Fermentation, Food
2 Comments
...red unusual beliefs. Buhner says, Though all indigenous cultures know that plants can speak with humankind, mandrake is almost the only plant from indigenous European practice about which this belief is still extant. Throughout its Christian European history, it has been believed that when mandrake was harvested, the root would scream, and that the sound would drive the harvester mad. The roots are said to resemble a human with the top of the plan...

Read…

130 Farm Unfixed with Jessica Rath

Avatar photo
Animals, Bees, Gardening, Native Plants, Permaculture, Podcasts
3 Comments
...of the land effects non-human species from the propagation of agricultural plants to the sensoria of bees.” She is on the faculty of the Art Center College of Design and her previous projects include works about apple breeding, co-evolutionary communication between flowering plants and their pollinators and a long term project called Farm Unfixed that we spend most of this conversation discussing. During the podcast Jessica mentions, Foxfire The m...

Read…

Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

Avatar photo
Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
10 Comments
...y sized cargo bicycle. And in my last straw bale garden some of the tomato plants showed signs (a lot of leaves and not a lot of fruit) of too much nitrogen. On the other side of that equation I grew some truly monstrous winter squash, enough to feed all the inhabitants of a generously sized cult compound. This time around I’m trying an inorganic approach, substituting the blood meal I used last time for urea. I’m curious to see if I notice any di...

Read…