Nopales Season

March 27, 2008

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...d us. To cook up our nopales we use a simple recipe found in Delena Tull’s book, Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest. First scrape off the spines with a knife and chop a pad (one pad per person). Boil for 10 minutes. Next, put 1/3 cup whole wheat flour, 2/3 cup cornmeal, 1 teaspoon chili powder, salt and pepper in a bag and shake with the boiled chopped nopales. Fry up in a pan and you’ve got a delicious side dish. One of the charm...

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When the Crate’s Better Than the Chair

Mr. Homegrown

November 23, 2009

Design

2 Comments

...hooses the crate rather than the piece of furniture.” You can bet our next book will have some Rietveld inspired DIY designs. In the meantime, for the industrious makers out there, the chair above would be a cinch to back-engineer with pallet wood. Rietveld sold pre-made kits for the volk to assemble themselves. You can still buy a crate chair kit for $450 produced by Rietveld’s grandkids, but a few hours with a sawzall, drill and some screws and...

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Make an Aluminum Can Lamp

Mr. Homegrown

December 26, 2006

Preparedness

8 Comments

...do this by taping a razor blade to a piece of metal and inserting it in a book. Simply rotate the can against the blade a few times and you will get a nice even cut. Precision isn’t necessary for this project (unlike the Pepsi can stove) so you can also do this step with a pair of scissors. 4. Punch out a 1/4 inch hole in the bottom of the can for the wick. 5. Cut a 1/2 inch by 3 inch piece of cotton from an old shirt for the wick. 6. Cut out a 2...

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Let’s Get Biointensive

Mr. Homegrown

October 16, 2009

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

11 Comments

I picked up a handy tip on plant spacing from John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables. Jeavons dislikes rows and instead uses the triangular spacing of the French biointensive method. You can view a nice diagram of biointensive spacing on the LandShare Colorado website. And see some images of the way Jeavons’ spaces his garden on This Girl’s Gone Green. Triangular plantings squeeze more veggies into small spaces. The tight spacing, with le...

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Favorite Plants- New Zealand Spinach

Homegrown Neighbor

October 13, 2009

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

15 Comments

...en growing it for many years and find it a reliable plant. In The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy writes, “New Zealand spinach makes a marvelous temporary ground cover, is good in hanging baskets, and will cascade over the sides of planter boxes. Grow it on the patio so it will be close at hand to add to your morning scrambled eggs along with dill and cheese.” I have so much in my garden right now that I may do a big harvest a...

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