by Judy | Aug 16, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening, Recipes
We spent an extra long weekend in Pittsburgh for the Garden Writers’ Conference, touring public and private gardens, learning what garden writers learn when they go to school, and connecting with old friends and making new ones. When we came back last Tuesday the garden was bursting with produce. The big bowl above is just a small portion of what we’ve harvested in the last couple of days. Of course, I had to make our favorite summer casserole which uses up...
by Judy | Aug 3, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening, Recipes
For years we grew soft neck garlic – because that’s what we got started with. It’s only been about the past 5 years that we switched to mainly hard neck types. We found a lot of different hard neck varieties at farmers’ markets and garlic festivals that looked intriguing, from small to huge, red to tan and mild to spicy. Each garlic type has an individual flavor. It’s been fun to grow the different types but we’re certainly not connoisseurs. When cooking I’d...
by Noel | Jul 8, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
I didn’t have the heart to cull out some of my beautiful and healthy tomato starts so I ended up with 78 plants in two beds. My normal planting is 60 plants in two beds so I had to cheat a little on the spacing. I opened up the width across the rows and pushed the plants as far to the edges of the bed as I thought I might get away with. I still came close to a 20″ spacing between plants and that’s close to what I always do. I’d already...
by Noel | May 11, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
An advantage of our open bed system of gardening and the relatively undisturbed soil system is the amount of volunteers we get. I encourage volunteer herbs and greens by letting a lot of plants go to seed. Here is a picking of lettuces and mustards augmented with some purposely cultivated baby spinach and spring onions. Judy worked her usual kitchen magic to come up with a spring meal of baby greens, oven roasted asparagus and a vegetarian fried rice using soy...
by Noel | Apr 6, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
This is my asparagus, which I planted in 1989. The picture was taken just before I cut down the stalks from last season’s growth. A lot of gardeners cut their stalks back in the fall, but I’ve read several sources which say it makes more sense to let the stalks keep growing and feeding the roots as long as possible. I normally cut the stalks back in March, but this March was too cold to want to do anything in the garden, so it didn’t happen until the first warm...
by Noel | Jan 29, 2014 | CobraHead, Gardening
Sweet potatoes store well, but they don’t keep forever. Above are the last of our 2012 harvest. These were dug up 15 months ago. They will still be edible, but we need to use them up as soon as possible. They’ve begun to sprout and that’s a good thing. For the last two years I’ve grown my sweet potatoes using sprouts like this, rather than starting new sprouts on a whole potato. This method is much easier. Vine cuttings would work nearly as well. The sprouts...
