by Noel | Dec 15, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
The 2015 CobraHead Home Garden was a great success. The garden is never the same from year to year. Weather, seed and plant inputs, labor, luck, and a lot of other variables make each garden season a new experience. That’s an advantage for home gardeners. They don’t need perfection to be successful, and last year’s errors are only lessons for the future. I like to tell beginning gardeners not to worry. Plant enough different stuff and some of it will turn...
by Noel | Nov 19, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
We had a huge potato harvest as the result of growing three beds rather than two and using seed potatoes from Wood Prairie Farm that gave us a much greater yield than previous seed sources. We ended up with over 300 pounds of potatoes from a 30 pound planting. I knew that if we didn’t find better storage than the basement, we would lose a lot of crop, so I made a quick cold storage set-up out of straw bales and an old wooden shipping crate. Using a small stall in...
by Judy | Nov 16, 2015 | CobraHead, Recipes
You may have read about our harvest of smaller squash in a previous post by Noel. The trellised squash yielded about 35 winter squash. We hadn’t even started counting the large varieties which included a 37 pound Boston Marrow, four Hubbards, several Red Kuris, large pumpkins, small pie pumpkins and some unknowns. So this is the year to get creative with squash. It’s very filling and a little goes a long way. It’s good just roasted and it works...
by Judy | Nov 2, 2015 | CobraHead, Recipes
Above is a picture of the purple sauerkraut I started a couple of days ago with cabbage, ginger, dill and hot pepper. We had about ten cabbages of four different varieties in this year’s garden. Since we don’t have a great way to store them fresh for any length of time I went on a fermentation binge. Three years ago when I made my first successful ferment I wrote about the method used here. While that’s a perfectly fine method I was introduced...
by Noel | Oct 31, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
Our target for planting garlic is the end of October. We hit it this year and I’m always happier when the cloves are set for their winter sprouting. Yesterday, I planted 76 saved seeds and added 38 new seeds, Lorz Italian, a softneck variety we purchased last week from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, our neighbors across the aisle at the Mother Earth News Fair in Topeka. I had a bed nearly ready to go. Potatoes had been harvested from it, earlier. It was...
by Noel | Oct 28, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
As the garden season winds down, we’re happy to report that we’ve had another great sweet potato harvest. I like to remind people that it’s easy to grow sweet potatoes even up north, here in Wisconsin. Here are the potato vines, about two weeks ago. We already had a light frost and the leaves were pretty moth eaten from Japanese beetles. I decided not to wait longer to get them out of the ground. I stacked all the vines up in the center of the...
