by Noel | Oct 15, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
With several nights of frost predicted for this coming week, it was time to harvest the sweet potatoes. They will not tolerate frost. Here’s the bed of potatoes, thick with foliage. The plants are grown through a cover of black plastic which heats the bed up quickly in the spring and pretty much eliminates any weeds. Harvesting is much easier if all the foliage is cut away and removed first. This is the second year I used this sheet of plastic and it...
by Noel | Sep 15, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
Yesterday, the Weather Service forecast a hard freeze for Cambridge. The weather people always try to err on the worst case side of things, but you never know, so Judy and I covered everything we could with plastic or ag fabric. We managed to cover the tomatoes, the peppers, the squash, the sweet potatoes, the basil and remaining cukes, and some of the beans. While hardly an architectural masterpiece, form follows function, and Louis Sullivan would have to give...
by Noel | Sep 11, 2011 | CobraHead
With Anneliese and Geoff off to California this week to represent CobraHead at the National Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa, it seems a little odd to be posting about a hybrid tomato. However, I grow hybrids frequently. Hybridizing has been around a long, long time and is something that can be accomplished by nearly anyone including the home gardener. Hybrid seeds should not be confused with genetically modified seeds. There are qualities that can be...
by Noel | Aug 21, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
I finally built a tomato trellis that I’m happy with. I knew this was a good approach years ago, but it was one of those projects I never took the time to complete. I usually grow about 30 tomato plants in three rows in one of my 20 feet long by five feet wide beds. Two years ago, when my crop was decimated by late blight, I learned that blight can be slowed by good air circulation. Crowded and damp conditions greatly increase the chance of blight, and I...
by Noel | Jul 31, 2011 | CobraHead, Events
Judy and I did a one day show yesterday in La Farge, Wisconsin called the Kickapoo Country Fair. The show is sponsored by the Organic Valley Farmers Cooperative which is headquartered in La Farge. I’ve mentioned the show several times before. Even though it’s a small show, we like doing it because La Farge is located in the middle of some of Wisconsin’s best scenery, the driftless area, which was not scrubbed flat by the last great glacier...
