by Noel | Aug 18, 2008 | CobraHead, Events, Gardening
That’s Irene Bender, the event coordinator for the Minnesota Garlic Festival , held last Saturday at the Wright County Fairgrounds in Howard Lake, Minnesota. Nice Hat! The garlic festival is a little show featuring about a dozen small farmers offering over 100 varieties of garlic. Garlic was for sale, but so were other homegrown foods and locally produced goods. Garlic flavored food was in abundance including garlic brats, garlic potatoes, pickled garlic,...
by Noel | Aug 8, 2008 | CobraHead, Environmental Issues, Events, Gardening
In our ongoing quest to make the CobraHead Weeder famous, we occasionally try new trade show venues. Since I thought there had to be a connection between farming and gardening, we exhibited at a show in Minnesota this week called Farmfest. The show organizers had invited us out as a “green” vendor and we were in a tent with others promoting such things as organic farming, sustainable agriculture, energy issues and land conservation. While I found the...
by Noel | Jul 28, 2008 | CobraHead, Events
This weekend, Judy and I were vendors at the Kickapoo Country Fair in La Farge, Wisconsin: Kickapoo Country Fair. The fair is in its fifth year and is hosted on the grounds of Organic Valley’s headquarters. Organic Valley is the farmer’s cooperative that has been at the forefront of the organic movement in the United States. This part of Wisconsin, The Kickapoo River Valley, is part of a large portion of southwestern Wisconsin knows as the driftless...
by Noel | Jul 23, 2008 | Environmental Issues, Gardening
We’ve grown purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) for many years. Once established, it’s a super-easy perennial, really only requiring weeding and occasional separation. It spreads quickly. By chance three years ago, we had some common milkweed (asclepias syriaca) show up in a clump of coneflowers we have growing by the light post in our driveway. Our normal reaction would have been to pull the milkweed out. It grows in some of the wilder part of the...
by Noel | Jun 27, 2008 | Gardening
Wisconsin has seen some record rainfalls in the past month. We are in the drainage basin of the Rock River, which eventually empties into the Mississippi River by Rock Island, Illinois. The huge rains contributed to flooding of the Rock and its tributary rivers and creeks, a lot of the flooding was extremely severe and damaging. Many of the farm fields around us still have acres of new ponds, three weeks after the worst of the rains. What the rains and floods also...
