by Noel | Nov 15, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
Wine Cap Mushrooms (Stropharia rugosa annulata) are considered one of the easiest mushrooms to grow. Easy to grow, but highly prized, Wine Caps are noted for both their large size and excellent taste. Wine Caps are not often found in stores because of their fragile nature. This is my first attempt at growing them. As with the shiitake mushrooms I’ve grown for many years, my Wine Cap stropharia spawn came from Field and Forest Products, Inc., Peshtigo, Wisconsin....
by Noel | Oct 29, 2016 | CobraHead, Environmental Issues, Gardening
About five years ago I bought a flat of marigolds at a garden show in Rockford, Illinois. The flat cost only five dollars. I presumed the marigolds were neither organic nor open pollinated, but they looked strong and there were a lot of plants for the money. I thought I would stick marigolds at the ends of the raised beds to add some easy and quick color. This was in June. The plants performed well and bloomed until hard freezes came. They put out seed heads with...
by Noel | Oct 15, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
This year’s sweet potato harvest was certainly different than most. It was the largest we’ve ever had, over 125 pounds. Our previous best was 85 pounds. We normally yield between 75 and 80 pounds, so this was “really shocking”. We also had the largest single potato we’ve ever grown, eleven pounds. The quality was definitely not the best ever as we had a lot of cracked skins, which we are attributing to unusually high rainfall. Our planting routine for...
by Noel | Oct 10, 2016 | CobraHead, Garden Tools, Gardening
It looks like a pile of straw, but it’s really a very structured compost pile. I built it over the weekend. It’s layered and there is actually not that much straw in it. My raw ingredients included a pile of two seasons worth of garden debris – weeds, stalks, trimmings and anything else organic collected around the yard and garden that was not super woody. It was mostly already broken down and partially composted. I had a completely broken down 55...
by Noel | Jul 19, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
I advocate the use of open raised beds for home gardening. I’ve been working with open beds for over 30 years. There are lots of advantages over both conventional planting in rows, and also over assembled, boxed in beds. I’ve got two plots with open beds. The area I call the south beds is a very geometric layout of 18 beds, each about 5 feet wide by 20 feet long. The north bed area is a lot more haphazard. It borders on a weedy, woody area “where the wild...
by Noel | Jul 13, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
We harvested our 100 garlic plants yesterday. The bulbs were almost all quite large and firm. We didn’t wait for the stalks (on the soft necks) to fall over, the traditional sign that it’s time to harvest. We were expecting some extended rains and we didn’t want to harvest wet bulbs, nor did we want the outer skin layers to start splitting. The time was right. We planted two rows of hard necks and one row of soft necks. I started out using the broad fork to...
