by Noel | Oct 22, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
Judy harvested these two excellent heads of cauliflower this afternoon. The one on the right is one of the best heads we’ve ever grown. It was over eight inches across and perfect in every way. I searched “cauliflower” on Wikipedia just to see what might be of interest for a blog post and discovered fractal dimensions. Mathematicians find broccoli and cauliflower interesting because of their fractals. A paper cited says: “The fractal...
by Noel | Oct 21, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
We’ve been harvesting salad greens from the cold frame I built earlier this year. I talk about the building of the cold frame here. I seeded the frame about a month ago with a mix of mustard, spinach, arugula, several Asian greens and some lettuces. As the picture shows, germination was excellent. Until now, when we are finally getting some very cool nights, the main issue has been to remember to open up the glass lid totally during the day. The daytime...
by Geoff | Oct 19, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
A few months ago I came across Mike Lieberman’s website, the Urban Organic Gardener. He posted several how-to videos about making self-watering planters out of reclaimed five gallon pails. He does an excellent job explaining how to make them, so I’m not going to repeat all of the steps in this post. I decided that this would be a perfect project to try out with the Save Our Youth Project of Red Salmon Arts, housed at Resistencia Bookstore. We had already...
by Geoff | Oct 17, 2011 | CobraHead
We want to thank everyone who donated to Austin’s Urban Roots last month. Because of all of your contributions we raised over $850 to help keep this inspiring youth agriculture program running strong. We will be sending Urban Roots at least $850 worth of our tools and other products as a match to the cash donation. We also want to thank everyone who re-posted, re-tweeted, facebooked, or otherwise helped get the word out about the fundraiser. In particular, we...
by Noel | Oct 16, 2011 | CobraHead, Environmental Issues
Turkey vultures are extremely common in Wisconsin, but it’s rare to see them flying directly overhead in my yard. Our wooded property is the main residence of an extended family of crows that controls the neighborhood skies. The crows never allow vultures, owls, hawks or other larger birds to secure the local airspace or even intrude into it for very long. This afternoon there must have been a major road kill on US Highway 18 which is the north border of...
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...
