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 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...
by Judy | Sep 21, 2011 | Gardening
This is the year of the tomato for us – our best harvest in three years. Two years ago the blight attacked our tomatoes and last year due to an extremely busy schedule we didn’t do a good job of trellising and keeping the tomatoes off ground. Our freezer was looking mighty empty of our favorite garden produce. We’ve been making lots of sauce for the freezer and as you can see from the pictures we’ve been drying cherry type tomatoes. The dried tomatoes are great...
by Noel | Sep 15, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
Yesterday, the Weather Service forecast a hard freeze for Cambridge. The weather people always try to err on the worst case side of things, but you never know, so Judy and I covered everything we could with plastic or ag fabric. We managed to cover the tomatoes, the peppers, the squash, the sweet potatoes, the basil and remaining cukes, and some of the beans. While hardly an architectural masterpiece, form follows function, and Louis Sullivan would have to give...
