Saturday Tweets: Cooking in Clay, Cuteness and Pickles

July 22, 2017

...tD8uvH — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 20, 2017 Small Batch Bread and Butter Pickles https://t.co/JekNG6H15g — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 22, 2017 What is “cute”? | Garden Rant https://t.co/Y84XRMZET4 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 22, 2017 Harvesting Electronic Components https://t.co/cP5r86jl03 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 22, 2017 Check out this podcast with my partner, Claudia West with Margaret Roach https://t.co/UiHBzK9YZe pic.twi...

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Peat Moss is Gardening Crack

Mr. Homegrown

August 13, 2015

Gardening

14 Comments

...es/publications/factsheet/pub__9468201.pdf http://puyallup.wsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/403/2015/03/horticultural-peat.pdf http://flrec.ifas.ufl.edu/Hort/Environmental/Media_Nutrition/COIR%20potential.htm When I put this article in Facebook, Renate sent a picture of what peat harvesting looks like in Nartum, Germany near where she grew up: Leave it to us humans to make a desert in Germany! We’ve experimented with mixes of coir and compost but...

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Thankful for the New Rain Garden

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

7 Comments

...lf of our roughly 1,000 square foot roof. Using this handy online rainfall harvesting calculator, in an average year we could send almost 6,000 gallons of water to our backyard. We ran a pipe from the rain gutter way back into the yard along a fence. The pipe terminates at a simulated gravel filled stream bed that spills into the rain garden. Kelly has just started planting the wet lower part of the rain garden with native plants including water l...

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Olive Curing Update

Mr. Homegrown

May 4, 2020

Fruit Trees, Gardening

5 Comments

...he olives looked like at the beginning of the curing process. The verdict: harvesting and curing olives is a lot of work but well worth the effort. It took six months of curing to leach out the bitter phenolic compounds in the fruit. Some things I learned in the process: Here in Southern California, where we have a plague of olive fruit flies, you need to set a McPhail trap baited with torula yeast lures and change out the bait once a month. I set...

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Kelly and Chocineal

Mr. Homegrown

August 31, 2020

Animals, Insects

5 Comments

...cus) is a scale insect that produces carminic acid which is extracted for use as a red textile and food dye. I thought cochineal dying might make for the perfect quarantine craft project until I did some research. Like many things worth doing, harvesting and dying textiles with cochineal is a process that takes experience and skill. The Zapotec people of Oaxaca have been practicing this skill for a thousand years. In the video above you can see ho...

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