Dry Climate Vegetables

...the seeds we buy for our vegetable gardens are adapted to require lots of water. One solution is to find veggies that have reseeded accidentally without supplemental irrigation. Here’s a short list of reseeding rogue veggies from our garden that have thrived with just the small burst of rain we got last month. New Zealand Spinach The one I’m most excited about is New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides). It’s reappeared for at lest three y...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Cow Appreciation Day

...com/QxzmAXw2Rh — Scratching The Surface (@surfacepodcast) July 9, 2018 Low-water gardens buzz with life. They are bright, brilliant, colorful gardens with as much interest and variety—and in some ways more—than any other gardens. In fact, color and low water go hand in hand. https://t.co/Z4ltkYnlXo pic.twitter.com/oGny74F3TD — Timber Press (@timberpress) July 10, 2018 “Eventually, I gave up on staying on protected bike routes and went for cruising...

Read…

I Made a Coffee Sandwich

...raffic sewer in Silver Lake. Their sign promised “Coffee-Sandwich Drinking Water.” A friend and I used to speculate about what a “coffee sandwich” would consist of every time we went past the place. It took may years but I decided this month to bring some closure to this idle speculation. I based my prompt on the dessert sandwiches I ate on our recent trip to Japan. Typically, those sandwiches consist of a fruit and whipped cream filling served on...

Read…

Use Your Microwave as Dough Proofing Box

...t a microwave you’ve got a proofing box. Just heat a mason jar filled with water for a few minutes and stick your dough in for both the bulk fermentation and proofing. If you don’t have a microwave you could heat some water on a stove and put it and your dough in a cooler. If you want to get really fancy you could use a seed propagation heating mat in a cooler. I don’t have a mat so I’ve been using the microwave and it works great. There are reaso...

Read…

Growing Pink Oyster Mushrooms

...d, you use it to inoculate bags of straw that have been pasteurized in hot water. I think we ended up with something like 16 small bags of straw divided between our group. Keep the bags inoculated in step 3 in a humid environment with some indirect light and wait for them to fruit. This all sounds a lot harder than it actually was. Oyster mushrooms have a reputation for easily out-competing molds that can tank other mushrooms. The culture we used...

Read…