by Noel | Oct 29, 2016 | CobraHead, Environmental Issues, Gardening
About five years ago I bought a flat of marigolds at a garden show in Rockford, Illinois. The flat cost only five dollars. I presumed the marigolds were neither organic nor open pollinated, but they looked strong and there were a lot of plants for the money. I thought I would stick marigolds at the ends of the raised beds to add some easy and quick color. This was in June. The plants performed well and bloomed until hard freezes came. They put out seed heads with...
by Judy | Oct 27, 2016 | CobraHead, Recipes
We have a nice patch of fall beets. The thinnings are great for sautéing and if there’s a baby beet attached, so much the better. Way back when, my mother used to serve cooked spinach with a splash of cider vinegar. I just changed it up to balsamic vinegar which has a natural sweetness to better complement the beet greens. Here’s the recipe: 1-2 T. olive oil or butter 1 cup sliced onions 1/2 pound of beet greens and baby beets 1-2 T. balsamic vinegar...
by Noel | Oct 15, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
This year’s sweet potato harvest was certainly different than most. It was the largest we’ve ever had, over 125 pounds. Our previous best was 85 pounds. We normally yield between 75 and 80 pounds, so this was “really shocking”. We also had the largest single potato we’ve ever grown, eleven pounds. The quality was definitely not the best ever as we had a lot of cracked skins, which we are attributing to unusually high rainfall. Our planting routine for...
by Noel | Oct 10, 2016 | CobraHead, Garden Tools, Gardening
It looks like a pile of straw, but it’s really a very structured compost pile. I built it over the weekend. It’s layered and there is actually not that much straw in it. My raw ingredients included a pile of two seasons worth of garden debris – weeds, stalks, trimmings and anything else organic collected around the yard and garden that was not super woody. It was mostly already broken down and partially composted. I had a completely broken down 55...
