by Noel | Mar 22, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
It looks as though about all of the 100 plus cloves I planted last October have sprouted and are showing their flags through the protective straw. Garlic flags are a sure sign of spring. I‘m impressed by the strength of the leaves that push up through the wet and still icy straw blanket.
by Noel | Mar 21, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
I finally got my onion seeds into flats, yesterday. I had purposely held off planting because Judy and I were on the road for nearly two weeks. I didn’t want to enlist anyone to look after my newly sprouted seedlings. I normally target late January or early February to plant onion seeds, but I’m pretty sure my late March start will work out fine. The flats from bottom to top contain: Copra yellow onion – 500 seeds; Red Wing red onion – 500 seeds; Candy –...
by Noel | Dec 15, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
The 2015 CobraHead Home Garden was a great success. The garden is never the same from year to year. Weather, seed and plant inputs, labor, luck, and a lot of other variables make each garden season a new experience. That’s an advantage for home gardeners. They don’t need perfection to be successful, and last year’s errors are only lessons for the future. I like to tell beginning gardeners not to worry. Plant enough different stuff and some of it will turn...
by Noel | Nov 19, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
We had a huge potato harvest as the result of growing three beds rather than two and using seed potatoes from Wood Prairie Farm that gave us a much greater yield than previous seed sources. We ended up with over 300 pounds of potatoes from a 30 pound planting. I knew that if we didn’t find better storage than the basement, we would lose a lot of crop, so I made a quick cold storage set-up out of straw bales and an old wooden shipping crate. Using a small stall in...
by Noel | Oct 31, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
Our target for planting garlic is the end of October. We hit it this year and I’m always happier when the cloves are set for their winter sprouting. Yesterday, I planted 76 saved seeds and added 38 new seeds, Lorz Italian, a softneck variety we purchased last week from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, our neighbors across the aisle at the Mother Earth News Fair in Topeka. I had a bed nearly ready to go. Potatoes had been harvested from it, earlier. It was...
