Heirloom Expo in Photos

September 14, 2015

I highly recommend making the trip next year to Santa Rosa to see the National Heirloom Exposition put on by the folks at Baker Creek Seeds. The centerpiece of the expo is the massive display of hundreds of different varieties of squash, melons, tomatoes and other edibles. It’s inspiring and frustrating all at once since, unless you have your own garden, you’ll never see such diversity at the supermarket. I came back with the will to improve our...

Read…

Root Simple is 10 Years Old

Mr. Homegrown

July 13, 2016

Thoughtstylings

20 Comments

...I should note that this blog had one false start: a blog about our parkway vegetable garden. That 2005 blog went to two posts before becoming an internet ghost site that I’ve lost the password to access and can’t delete it. The parkway itself is, ironically, still a work in progress. Our podcast, now in its 89th episode as of this week, also had two false starts but is going strong. Much ink could be spilled on the influence on bloggers like us of...

Read…

Best veggies to cook in a solar oven

Mrs. Homegrown

August 5, 2016

Food, Recipes, Solar Oven Summer

2 Comments

...arrots, Brussels sprouts, zucchini) I’m a big fan of roasting and sauteing vegetables, and only like a few vegetables in their steamed form. Brussels sprouts and cauliflower before cooking The same after. Not a failure, exactly, but just …bland and wet, as steamed vegetables always taste to me. Note the color of the cauliflower. That is not oven-browning, but rather the slight discoloration that some vegetables pick up in the solar oven. The color...

Read…

043 Growing Vegetables with Yvonne Savio

Mr. Homegrown

April 15, 2015

Gardening, Podcasts, Vegetable Gardening

4 Comments

...own food. Favorite vegetables. How to harvest vegetables. How to prepare a vegetable garden. Making compost. The problems with municipal compost. Raised beds vs. growing in the ground. Where to buy soil. Testing soil. How to irrigate vegetables in a drought. Buried buckets for watering vegetables. Seeds vs. seedlings. Succession planting. How to plant seedlings. The website and calendar that Yvonne is putting together. Grow LA Victory Garden Progr...

Read…

A Prickly Harvest

Mr. Homegrown

August 3, 2007

Gardening

3 Comments

...can now announce why, ironically, we’ve been too busy to keep up with our vegetable beds–next spring the good folks at Process Media will be releasing our book The Urban Homesteader. While we’ve been negligent in some of the small scale agricultural duties we profile in the book, at least we have our prickly pear cactus to keep us in fruit this summer. And due to the unusual quantity of fruit our prickly pear has gifted us with we’re experimentin...

Read…