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

643 results

Tree Spinach – Chenopodium giganteum

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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...

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Planting a Mini-Orchard

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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,...

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Tomato Review #2 Banana Legs – it don’t look like a banana and it don’t got legs

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Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
...in a self watering container (SWC) and it produced a respectable amount of fruit. With a sunny balcony, folks in apartments could do the same. For our container we used a repurposed storage bin and we’d recommend the largest container you can find for tomatoes or sticking to tomato varieties specifically bred for containers. As soon as the large root system of a tomato plant gets down into the water reservoir at the bottom of an SWC you can get so...

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Build a Solar Dehydrator

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Appropriate Technology, Preparedness, Solar
22 Comments
...live in a very dry desert climate like Phoenix, Arizona you can’t just set fruit out in the sun and expect it to do anything but go moldy. In most places in the world, including here in Los Angeles, the relative humidity is too high to dry things out in the sun. Solar dehydrators work by increasing air flow to dry out the food. The one we built uses a clever strategy to get air moving without the use of electric fans such as you’d find in your typ...

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Homegrown Evolution Visits the Los Angeles County Fair

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Thoughtstylings
2 Comments
...school kids, sitting amongst straw bales, were being taught how to make a fruit smoothie by Monica Montes, R.D., who was sporting one of those wearable microphones just like the drive-through cashiers at McDonald’s use. I fled, fearing that I might ask something snarky during the question and answer session. I guess every R.D. has their price. Who knows, with the high cost of Mr. Homegrown Evolution’s recent root canal, you may soon see our backy...

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