by Noel | Jul 4, 2012 | CobraHead, Environmental Issues, Gardening
We have not had significant rainfall for six weeks. I was told that June was the driest recorded here since they started keeping records. Today and tomorrow will be among the two hottest days in south central Wisconsin since the weather service started logging meteorological data. 103 was reported as a high today, highest ever for July. The all-time high temperature record here was 104 in August of 1988. Tomorrow may be hotter yet. In most of the 26 years...
by Noel | Jul 2, 2012 | CobraHead
CobraHead is a member of the Garden Writers Association – GWA. It’s been a great organization, as garden writers have been instrumental in helping us get the word out about CobraHead Tools. The GWA is divided into various regions and we officially belong to Region V, which last Friday had a meeting in Madison. Anneliese and I made a field trip with garden writers from around the Midwest to visit four excellent Madison garden sites. In order, we visited...
by Noel | Jun 4, 2012 | CobraHead, Events, Gardening
This weekend Judy and I were vendors at the Klehm Arboretum Garden Fair. This was our seventh year at the event now in it’s 19th year. Rockford is just under 70 miles from home. If you don’t know Rockford, it’s the second biggest population area in Illinois outside the Chicago metro area. Rockford used to be an industrial dynamo, but like a lot of Midwestern towns, heavy manufacturing went bust, and for a while Rockford suffered some very...
by Noel | May 10, 2012 | CobraHead, Gardening
Here are two videos about garlic and inter-planting garlic with salad greens. I plant garlic here in southern Wisconsin in late October. I plant the cloves along the top of ridges of a raised bed that has been shaped into three ridges (or two troughs). After I plant the garlic I mulch it deeply with straw. I plant the garlic on the tops of ridges in my dense clay soil because garlic likes to be well drained. I’m minimizing the chance of the garlic getting...
by Noel | May 2, 2012 | CobraHead, Gardening
There are normally three steps to growing vegetables that require indoor seeding. First you plant the seeds in a growing medium into a flat or a small container. Second, you transplant the sprouted seedlings after they have established themselves into a second, larger container. This is called potting off and it gives the seedlings room to expand both their root system and their leaf growth. Then, when the weather is right these transplanted and firmly...
