Nopales Season

March 27, 2008

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...opales (the pads of the prickly pear cactus for you Yankees) season at the Homegrown Evolution compound. Our prickly pear has thrown off so many leaves that a neighbor dropped by last week to ask for some. We filled a bag for her and declined the dollar she offered us. To cook up our nopales we use a simple recipe found in Delena Tull’s book, Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest. First scrape off the spines with a knife and chop a p...

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Mahonia gracilis – Mexican Barberry

Mr. Homegrown

November 7, 2007

Gardening

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One of the biggest challenges at the Homegrown Revolution compound has been finding useful plants that will grow in our shady backyard. Not having to provide supplemental irrigation would be another definite plus. Unfortunately very few plants fit those stringent requirements. We came across some seeds recently for a plant called Mahonia gracilis or Mexican Barberry, but there’s very little information about this medium sized shrub, native to Mex...

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We Grow Houses

Mr. Homegrown

September 27, 2007

Gardening, Pests

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...spree killer Andrew Cunanan. So when we spotted a NBC news truck near the Homegrown Revolution compound we assumed our Los Angeles neighborhood had produced a new celebrity killer. It turned out instead to be a photo op for the County of Los Angeles Agricultural Commissioner/Weights and Measures who had deployed the truck pictured above to spray pesticide due to an invasion of the oriental Fruit Fly Bactrocera dorsalis. Two traps in the area pick...

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Post Petroleum Lecture – a reminder

Mr. Homegrown

March 21, 2007

Miscellaneous

Homegrown Revolution, drunk from our many fermentation experiments, goofed and gave you all a bad link to reserve your spot in the upcoming lecture by Albert Bates, author of a brand new book The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook. To reserve your spot go to www.sustainablehabitats.org Bates will be speaking at the Audubon Center at Debs Park on Saturday March 24th as part of the 2007 Sustainable Habitats Lecture Series. Here’s the announ...

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The 10 Day $25 Survival Pack

Mr. Homegrown

March 26, 2007

Preparedness

This month’s issue of Backwoods Home Magazine, what Homegrown Revolution reads when we’re in a foul Unabomber type mood, has a handy article inspired by this winter’s Kim family tragedy. As you may recall the Kim family got lost on a seldom travelled road in Oregon and spent 10 days without supplies before James Kim finally made a fatal attempt to hike out through the cold. Playing armchair quarterback, the gun-toting off-griders at Backwoods Hom...

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