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

641 results

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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Growing Watermelons

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Gardening
10 Comments
...er watermelon vines I have going (in a better location) already have a few fruits developing on them. Some things I’ve learned about watermelons: 1. Fighting powdery mildew. Our inland coastal climate, with its hot summer days and cool evenings, is not the best place for melons as we tend to get powdery mildew, a white fungal growth that covers the leaves. However, our watermelon vines seem to be resistant to this problem, unlike the cantaloupes t...

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Interview With Apartment Gardener Helen Kim

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Gardening, Herbs
1 Comment
...t that is doing pretty nicely these days at my place, but not bearing much fruit… so I’ll be shipping him off mom’s in a couple weeks. HE: What do you use as fertilizer? HK: Shockingly, I suppose, before this year I didn’t use anything! I always thought plant vitamins, ‘food,’ and fertilizer were a bunch of hooey. But a friend recently gave me a little lecture on the importance of fertilizer and I thought I’d finally give it a whirl… and I have to...

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