by Geoff | Nov 9, 2011 | CobraHead, Events, Gardening
Over the past couple of years Noel has been developing and refining his presentations on organic raised-bed gardening. It’s about time. After thirty years of growing lots of good food, he has learned a thing or two. Below is the press release that we have put out touting his abilities. Please feel free to share this with any groups that would want to hear Noel speak. CobraHead’s Noel Valdes Speaks on Open Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening Cambridge, WI –...
by Noel | Nov 6, 2011 | CobraHead, Gardening
I took advantage of a dry day between the rains to get my garlic planted. I’ve been using a method Geoff taught me years ago that works particularity well with raised beds. I’ve posted the method several times before, but it’s worth repeating as it works so well. I form a loose worked-up bed into three ridges (or two troughs) using a steel rake. This year, before I planted the garlic cloves, I liberally dusted the entire bed with cilantro and...
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...
