Olive Curing Update

...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

...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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Peat Moss is Gardening Crack

...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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Kelly and Chocineal

...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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Pee on your Compost

...f you try this at least cease application at a respectable interval before harvesting. There is even a book called Liquid Gold on the subject of pee as fertilizer and the ever more resourceful Europeans have developed a number of urine diverting flush toilets similar to the one we profiled earlier to take the labor out of urine saving. Perhaps the most convenient way to use urine is to simply pee on your compost pile. That way you don’t need to wo...

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