Chicken of the Woods 2021

September 24, 2021

...te that should this mushroom show up on one of your trees you’ll want to hire an arborist as this fungus can cause serious structural problems. On the plus side you’ll have many gourmet meals. To review, eat the young growth, cook well and know the species of tree you’re harvesting from and you should be fine. Chicken of the woods is sort of a gateway to edible mushroom foraging as it’s one of the easiest wild mushrooms to identify. The only probl...

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We are all gardeners

Mrs. Homegrown

April 2, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Thoughtstylings

13 Comments

Pomo woman harvesting seeds, 1924, by Edward Curtis After a break for camping and other things, I’m returning to the series of posts I initiated a couple of weeks ago under the heading, Back to the Garden. While this series is meant to be practical, I have a little more “thoughtstyling” as we say around here before I turn to the hands-on material. Look for new series entries every Thursday. We are all gardeners. What does this mean? It’s a saying...

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Murder Hornets: It’s What’s for Dinner

Mr. Homegrown

May 13, 2020

Animals, Insects

11 Comments

...French Fries according to entomologist Matan Shelomi. There’s pictures and harvesting directions to prove it if you follow the link. The murder hornet looks tasty when deep fried. But what doesn’t? For more information see this fact sheet on the Asian giant hornet from Washington State University. If you’d like to meme about “murder” hornets there’s a Facebook group for you. There’s a term for when the media covers something that you have speciali...

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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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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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