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

641 results

Plantain!

Avatar photo
Food, Foraging, Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation
...there’s a lot of banana trees in Los Angeles they tend not to yield edible fruit since our climate is not quite hot and humid enough. But plantains, judging from the delicious taste of the ones we fried up, are a different story. They do require a lot of water to grow, but greywater expert Art Ludwig calls bananas (the same family as plantain) “the premiere plant for greywater in warm climates”. You can bet that as soon as the building inspectors...

Read…

Washing Machine Greywater Resources

Avatar photo
Water and Power, Water Conservation
5 Comments
...also turn a surge tank into a rain barrel. A description of our greywater fruit mini-orchard. Our greywater surge tank version 1.0. We’ve since added a pantyhose filter as seen above to catch lint that can clog the tank and garden hose. It’s just some threaded ABS waste pipe fittings screwed together with used pantyhose. A liquid fertilizer of the type that you could add to your greywater surge tank during a wash cycle to fertilize your garden. Y...

Read…

Mahonia gracilis – Mexican Barberry

Avatar photo
Gardening
5 Comments
...about this medium sized shrub, native to Mexico (or China depending on which source you believe). The Plants for a Future database report states that the plant grows in dry ravines of pine forests and produces an edible berry. But as usual most other sources don’t comment on the edibility of the fruit. To add to the paucity of information and general confusion, some botanists argue that the family name is incorrect and that it should be called Ber...

Read…

Tree Spinach – Chenopodium giganteum

Avatar photo
Food, Foraging, Vegetable Gardening
.... The billowing clouds of apocalyptic smoke from the fires ravaging the suburban fringes of our disaster prone megalopolis are the only thing that keeps us inside today, giving us time to contemplate one of the seed packets that has crossed our desk, Chenopodium giganteum a.k.a “tree spinach”. The Chenopodium family encompasses what less enlightened folks call “weeds” such as lambs quarters (also edible we’ll note), but also contains cultivated cr...

Read…

Planting a Mini-Orchard

Avatar photo
Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation
2 Comments
...some unknown reason) this greywater application has worked very well. Our fruit trees are lush and happy. With the news that Lake Mead could go dry by 2013 we figured it was about time to figure out how to grow food with very little water in a Mediterranean climate that gets on average 15 inches of rain a year (3 inches last year). Our water worries sparked the beginnings of our draught tolerant mini-orchard. Thankfully greywater and some tough,...

Read…