by Noel | Sep 28, 2008 | Gardening, Recipes
This year’s garden has been far from great. I’ve been on the road so many weekends that weeding maintenance has suffered. I didn’t even get a lot of beds planted. The fallow beds were not mulched, so weeds are rampant. I’m playing catch up, but things are starting to look up. Geoff and Anneliese are doing most of the shows we have scheduled for the rest of this year, so I should be able to get the garden cleaned up and covered with leaves...
by Geoff | Sep 10, 2008 | Gardening
Dolichos lablab in front of the makeshift cinderblock wall that I built off my front porch. Now when I sit on the front porch I see this: The view from the front Once the plants were established I gave them no additional water other than the little bit of runoff that they got when I watered the potted plants on the porch. The vines thrived during the 100 degrees for days on end drought that we experienced in Austin this summer. However, unlike the hyacinth beans...
by Noel | Aug 18, 2008 | CobraHead, Events, Gardening
That’s Irene Bender, the event coordinator for the Minnesota Garlic Festival , held last Saturday at the Wright County Fairgrounds in Howard Lake, Minnesota. Nice Hat! The garlic festival is a little show featuring about a dozen small farmers offering over 100 varieties of garlic. Garlic was for sale, but so were other homegrown foods and locally produced goods. Garlic flavored food was in abundance including garlic brats, garlic potatoes, pickled garlic,...
by Noel | Aug 8, 2008 | CobraHead, Environmental Issues, Events, Gardening
In our ongoing quest to make the CobraHead Weeder famous, we occasionally try new trade show venues. Since I thought there had to be a connection between farming and gardening, we exhibited at a show in Minnesota this week called Farmfest. The show organizers had invited us out as a “green” vendor and we were in a tent with others promoting such things as organic farming, sustainable agriculture, energy issues and land conservation. While I found the...
by Noel | Jul 23, 2008 | Environmental Issues, Gardening
We’ve grown purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) for many years. Once established, it’s a super-easy perennial, really only requiring weeding and occasional separation. It spreads quickly. By chance three years ago, we had some common milkweed (asclepias syriaca) show up in a clump of coneflowers we have growing by the light post in our driveway. Our normal reaction would have been to pull the milkweed out. It grows in some of the wilder part of the...
by Judy | Jul 20, 2008 | Gardening
You could probably call me all of the above right now since I just ate a mouthful of garlic scape pesto pasta! It was a little stronger and hotter than I was expecting probably due to the fact that the scapes were more ‘mature’ than they should have been. I harvested about 2/3 of our garlic yesterday. Noel planted about 100 cloves last October 27th (see his blog). As you can see from the picture they are a good size – that circular spot at the bottom...
