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...
by Noel | Jul 7, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
We’re having a bountiful pea harvest this year. The trellising system I’ve employed for the past few years works very well in allowing the peas to climb tall. The picture above, taken a few weeks ago shows, from left to right, snow peas, capucijner soup peas and two stands of sugar peas. Both varieties of sugar peas are types where you can eat the whole pod, or let them grow larger to eat the peas inside. We usually forgo any attempt to get loose...
by Noel | Jun 24, 2016 | CobraHead, Environmental Issues, Gardening
National Pollinator Week is a USDA sponsored event with the main focus of improving the health of pollinators, primarily, honeybees. I appreciate their efforts, but if the USDA really wanted to improve pollinator health, they would get out of their agri-business practices that are most responsible for loss of pollinator friendly ecosystems. Anyway, celebrating pollinators is a good thing, so we’ll contribute by featuring some of our local pollinating...
by Noel | May 26, 2016 | CobraHead, Gardening
This small bed has 90 Candy hybrid onion starts that I planted today. I took advantage of a morning rain that dampened the soil. Planting in wet soil made the transplanting shock minimal. This is the first time I’ve planted Candy. They are supposed to be big and sweet. I planted on 6 inch spacing to give them plenty of growing room. After I got them into the ground I gave them a good soak. They are looking happy, so far. This large bed has 152 Copra...
