We Grew a Cocktail Avocado!

December 15, 2017

...bout the methods of cocktail avocado growers (located in Spain). I suspect they are either using nets to exclude bees or they are just selectively harvesting the cocktail avocados that naturally occur on every tree....

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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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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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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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