by Judy | Sep 1, 2010 | Gardening, Recipes
Four plus pounds of various beans are pictured. I was nearly bowled over at the amount of beans I picked. If you had asked me a couple months ago I would have said we’d be lucky to get a handful. Since Noel didn’t get around to fencing the garden this year, creatures of all sorts have been nibbling everywhere. At least half of the bean plants were chomped off to within 4 inches of the ground. This mixed batch of beans was blanched for the freezer and our...
by Anneliese | Aug 25, 2010 | CobraHead, Gardening
Well, we Wisconsin CobraHeaders finally got our act together and started making videos in the garden. This is one of our first attempts from yesterday. Here, Noel deftly extracts a tap-rooted thistle from his pepper bed. We will be posting many more how-to videos as we continue to make them. If you have any videos of the CobraHead in action in your garden, we would love to see them! We may even post them here!
by Geoff | Aug 23, 2010 | Gardening
One of the benefits of not mowing my lawn as often or thoroughly as might be indicated by societal norms is that I get all sorts of interesting and sometimes useful plants that just show up. One of these is Chile Pequin, a semi-wild hot pepper of Texas and Mexico. Sown by birds that do me the favor of encasing the seeds in a small dose of fertilizer, I now have one of these shrubby pepper plants in both the front and back yard of my Austin house. I enjoy...
by Anneliese | Aug 6, 2010 | Environmental Issues, Gardening, Recipes
Well, it’s harvest time again, and the fruit flies are starting to find their way into the kitchen. They have also managed to find their way back into my worm bin, and I’m not totally cool with that. I don’t think Phil minds too much, but I’m not terribly fond of the little buggers. So now I guess it’s time to set up the traps again. There are plenty of different techniques for making fruit fly traps, but this one has worked pretty...
by Judy | Aug 5, 2010 | Gardening, Recipes
It definitely depends upon your perspective. For us we’re at the beginning of the summer squash season, and so far so good. I’ve been very diligent in checking and picking the young fruits every day. Yesterday morning I looked to see what we’d have for dinner & decided to pick the zucchini just before cooking. I’m positive that the earmarked one was twice the size from morning ‘til night. Well…at least 50% bigger! They will get ahead of me, they always...
by Noel | Aug 3, 2010 | Gardening
I commented earlier that this year I cleaned off my compost area and stuck in some squash and melon starts. I didn’t start the seeds until the second week of June, but as you can see from the first picture, the plants are doing quite well. For a while I was worried that I was getting all foliage and no fruit. That is not the case. I counted well over a dozen relatively large squash and pumpkins hiding under the leaves and several are very close to...
