Cichorium intybus a.k.a. Italian Dandelion

December 26, 2007

Our illegal parkway garden has got off to a slow start this season due to low seed germination rates. We’ve compensated with a trip to the Hollywood farmer’s market to pick up some six-packs of seedlings. One plant we made sure to get is Cichorium intybus, known in Italian as “cicoria” or chicory, but somehow, in the case of leaf chicory, mistranslated as “Italian dandelion,” probably because the leaves resemble the common dandelion weed, Taraxac...

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2008 . . . a year of luxury

Mr. Homegrown

January 1, 2008

Animals, Chickens

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...chicken supplies and trip to the Getty Villa to scope out their Roman herb garden and ancient tchatzhahs. The reason to hit the feed store was a return of schoolyard bully behavior from our pushy Rhode Island Red hen. We bought a bottle of Rooster Booster Pick-No-More Lotion™ to keep her from pecking the araucana hen. Thankfully the lotion, combined with a few other measures we’ll post about, seems to have stopped the problem. The lotion has lesse...

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Borlotto Bean Lingua di Fuoco

Mr. Homegrown

January 6, 2008

Vegetable Gardening

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...te vegetables, Borlotto Bean Lingua di Fuoco, is once again growing in our garden from seeds we saved from last year. We usually eat our Lingua di Fuoco (tongue of fire) beans young in the pod, but they can also be shelled and eaten fresh or dried. The handsome red speckling, which gives the bean its name, disappears when you cook them. The plant comes in both pole and bush versions. Borlotto beans are basically the Italian version of kidney beans...

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Save the World–Poop in a Bucket

Mr. Homegrown

January 30, 2008

Humanure

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...River Solid Waste Treatment Plant to . . . [spoiler here!] bags of soil at Home Depot. A Mother Earth News reader submitted a photo and description of a handsome sawdust privy made out of an old garden hose box. Very clever! Science Daily reports on Converting Sewage to Drinking Water. So take that laptop into your “meditation room” and get some reading done!...

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Tree Spinach – Chenopodium giganteum

Mr. Homegrown

October 23, 2007

Food, Foraging, Vegetable Gardening

...ution compound in Mediterranean Los Angeles, it’s time to start the winter garden. 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”...

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