by Noel | Jul 19, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
I advocate the use of open raised beds for home gardening. I’ve been working with open beds for over 30 years. There are lots of advantages over both conventional planting in rows, and also over assembled, boxed in beds. I’ve got two plots with open beds. The area I call the south beds is a very geometric layout of 18 beds, each about 5 feet wide by 20 feet long. The north bed area is a lot more haphazard. It borders on a weedy, woody area “where the wild...
by Noel | Jul 13, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
We harvested our 100 garlic plants yesterday. The bulbs were almost all quite large and firm. We didn’t wait for the stalks (on the soft necks) to fall over, the traditional sign that it’s time to harvest. We were expecting some extended rains and we didn’t want to harvest wet bulbs, nor did we want the outer skin layers to start splitting. The time was right. We planted two rows of hard necks and one row of soft necks. I started out using the broad fork to...
by Judy | Jul 7, 2016 | CobraHead, Recipes
This has been a great year for peas and we didn’t even have to share any with the roaming neighborhood deer. (Noel will tell you about his new electronic deer detractors in another post.) We have been eating snow peas and a couple varieties of sugar snap peas (edible pods) every day for the past 3 weeks. We have served them plain right out of the garden, as an appetizer with a dollop of soft feta/cream mix or hummus on one end, and with various stir...
by Noel | Jul 7, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
We’re having a bountiful pea harvest this year. The trellising system I’ve employed for the past few years works very well in allowing the peas to climb tall. The picture above, taken a few weeks ago shows, from left to right, snow peas, capucijner soup peas and two stands of sugar peas. Both varieties of sugar peas are types where you can eat the whole pod, or let them grow larger to eat the peas inside. We usually forgo any attempt to get loose...
