by Noel | Oct 9, 2007 | Gardening
Our gardens are suffering some neglect as we’ve all been doing a lot of time on the road. After almost a week at the Garden Writers Conference in Oklahoma City, we came back to find several yellow summer squash a little past their best picking date, but still quite edible. The red kuri and the huge sweet dumplings came from seed saved from store bought squash. The rest were from packaged seed. In addition to the winter squash shown in the picture, we have...
by Noel | Sep 23, 2007 | Gardening
Last April, my friend Michael Ball asked me if I’d be interested in helping him split the work of starting a crop of shiitake mushrooms. He supplied the cut red oak logs from the woods on his farm, I bought the mushroom spawn and we shared the work of drilling and plugging the logs with the spawn. I ended up with about fifteen logs each with about four dozen plugs or more and each plug a potential mushroom. Typically, the mushrooms appear the following...
by Noel | Sep 23, 2007 | CobraHead, Gardening
I’m happy with my potato harvest this year. I’ll end up with over forty pounds each of Red Norlands, Kennebec, and Russets which will last us well into next year. Growing your own potatoes is difficult to justify economically. Factory farm potatoes are practically given away here in Wisconsin, and even at a price of $2.00 per pound for locally grown organic potatoes my crop at most would be worth about $250. Mine are worth a lot less actually, since my...
