by Noel | Jul 8, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
I didn’t have the heart to cull out some of my beautiful and healthy tomato starts so I ended up with 78 plants in two beds. My normal planting is 60 plants in two beds so I had to cheat a little on the spacing. I opened up the width across the rows and pushed the plants as far to the edges of the bed as I thought I might get away with. I still came close to a 20″ spacing between plants and that’s close to what I always do. I’d already...
by Noel | May 11, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
An advantage of our open bed system of gardening and the relatively undisturbed soil system is the amount of volunteers we get. I encourage volunteer herbs and greens by letting a lot of plants go to seed. Here is a picking of lettuces and mustards augmented with some purposely cultivated baby spinach and spring onions. Judy worked her usual kitchen magic to come up with a spring meal of baby greens, oven roasted asparagus and a vegetarian fried rice using soy...
by Noel | Apr 6, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
This is my asparagus, which I planted in 1989. The picture was taken just before I cut down the stalks from last season’s growth. A lot of gardeners cut their stalks back in the fall, but I’ve read several sources which say it makes more sense to let the stalks keep growing and feeding the roots as long as possible. I normally cut the stalks back in March, but this March was too cold to want to do anything in the garden, so it didn’t happen until the first warm...
by Noel | Jan 29, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
Sweet potatoes store well, but they don’t keep forever. Above are the last of our 2012 harvest. These were dug up 15 months ago. They will still be edible, but we need to use them up as soon as possible. They’ve begun to sprout and that’s a good thing. For the last two years I’ve grown my sweet potatoes using sprouts like this, rather than starting new sprouts on a whole potato. This method is much easier. Vine cuttings would work nearly as well. The sprouts...
by Noel | Jan 18, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
This seed storage system is easy and inexpensive. It uses readily available off-the shelf CD storage boxes and zip-lock sandwich bags. It can be expanded as needed. Instructions follow. Prior to starting this system last year, I had my seeds mostly in a file folder box in zip lock bags, but the box was unwieldy, not large enough for all my seeds, and the file folders did not lend themselves to storage of really fat seed packets like corn, or home saved squash...
