Search Results for: label/fruit/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

643 results

Our Disastrous Summer Garden

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Fruit Trees, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
37 Comments
...lwarts, including a rosemary bush and a culinary sage. Despite all these disasters, I came back from the Heirloom Expo with some ideas: Spend a little less time on Facebook and a little more time in the garden. Come up with better raccoon fortifications. Take out stone fruit that isn’t performing (Kelly has wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve dragged my heels). Take better notes. Improve soil and restart a composting project. Come up with s...

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The Perfect Crisis Vegetable: Prickly Pear Cactus

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
...then chop and boil the pads for five minutes to reduce the sliminess. Then I fry the pads in a pan with onions. You can also just chop the pads and eat them raw in a salsa with tomatoes, onions and hot peppers. Some other resources from our blog for what to do with prickly pear fruit: A prickly pear fruit cocktail Juicing prickly pear fruit Prickly pear jam recipe If you’re not in our warm and dry-ish region a good resource for other edible peren...

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Pakistan Mulberry Fever

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Fruit Trees, Gardening
14 Comments
...d the room I’d say it’s worth the hassle of harvesting. Note from Mrs. Homegrown: I wanted to add that the odd things about these mulberries is that they have a green stem which runs all the way through the center of the fruit, so when you eat them your sort of scrape the fruit (drupes?) off the stem with your teeth, then discard it. Not that this is a problem–they’re delicious! I guess the stem is necessary to support their length....

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Karp’s Sweet Quince

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Food, Gardening
15 Comments
...log post, everything from jams to Spanish tapas dishes. Having to cook the fruit and the tree’s susceptibility to fire blight disease means that it has fallen out of favor in the US. There are a few varieties that can be eaten raw including Karp’s quince, which the USDA’s Germplasm Resources Information Network describes: “Grown in the Majes Valley in the province of Arequipa in southern Peru. C. T. Kennedy of the California Rare Fruit Growers rec...

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Jujube and Goji Fever

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Food, Gardening
11 Comments
...deciduous tree, tolerating cold but preferring hot summers to produce good fruit which can be eaten fresh or dried. Once dried, the fruit stores for many months. Goji berries (Lycium barbarum) While Creek Freak came back with his jujube, Mr. Homegrown Evolution snagged three small goji berry bushes (Lycium barbarum). Goji berries created a frenzy in new age circles a few years back, with some extraordinary health claims, and currently fetch $14 fo...

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