by Noel | May 30, 2025 | CobraHead, Gardening, Vegetable Growing
I work harder in the garden in May than in any other month. As usual at this time of the year, I’m way behind, but I’m still happy with what’s done so far. The south beds are neatly fenced in to protect the peas and other delicious delicacies from the marauding deer in the neighborhood. I’ve got all my trellises up, and the beds are in pretty good shape, with only one bed totally overgrown with weeds out of the eighteen in the plot. This is my holding bed....
by Noel | Apr 29, 2025 | CobraHead, Gardening, Growing Peas, Vegetable Growing
The peas were planted three weeks ago on April 12th. Spring peas are an important and reliable crop in our garden. I try to plant them early, when the chance of another killer freeze is minimal. I make ten trellises using T-posts and landscape fence. The trellises are windproof. The peas get plenty of sunshine and they are easy to harvest between the rows. This trellis is made with 7 ½ foot T-posts and 3-foot-wide landscape fence cut to five-foot lengths. The...
by Noel | Mar 31, 2025 | CobraHead
About 30 years ago I accidentally left some sweet potatoes in the basement well past their one year maximum shelf life. The potatoes were wrapped in newspaper in a relative dry environment. As I unwrapped the potatoes I found they were dehydrating and all the potatoes had put out sprouts, which, for lack of light, were pale pink or red, but were indeed, totally alive little sweet potato vines, feeding off the mother plant. I realized these sprouts would be easy to...
by Noel | Mar 28, 2025 | CobraHead, Gardening, Vegetable Growing
I’ve grown food for a long time. I learned a lot about home gardening from my mother who gardened because she had to, as we had little money. I also learned a lot from the neighbor next to us who was a vegetable gardener extraordinaire. Mrs. Martin came from her house in inner Detroit almost daily in growing season to garden a quarter acre plot next to our house in Warren, which borders Detroit on its north side. Rose Martin took a bus route that required several...
by Noel | Feb 28, 2025 | CobraHead, Gardening
I haven’t been thinking too much about my garden in February, and I definitely haven’t done anything outside. The 14 below lows and bitter cold days have kept me indoors. It did warm up this week, so I went to the garden to check things out. The garden fork hits ice between 2 to 6 inches. Our lack of snow cover this winter means the frost is quite deep and will take a little longer to thaw out. I won’t be working the soil anytime soon. Here’s my compost pile. This...
