by Judy | Jan 4, 2008 | Gardening
I say shal-uht, he says shuh-lot. When Geoff started talking about shuh-lots one day I crinkled my eyebrows. Isn’t that what mothers do when they’re perplexed? I wasn’t really perplexed but I had always said shal-uhts. So when I decided to write about our garden shallots I figured I should check out the pronunciation and definition. It seems that both pronunciations are correct. Most online dictionary sources indicate shal-uht as the first choice...
by Geoff | Dec 17, 2007 | Environmental Issues, Gardening
Compost is integral to sustainable gardening practices. It is also a great way to get rid of kitchen waste without putting stuff into the trash stream. We’ve been composting for as long as we’ve been gardening and our system now is a pretty automatic routine. All compostable kitchen waste is stored in a 2 1/2 gallon plastic bucket under the sink. Since we don’t eat any meat at home, most of our organic scrap waste goes into the compost bucket....
by Noel | Nov 29, 2007 | CobraHead, Gardening
Our blog was launched to help us sell our CobraHead garden tool products. The Internet may prove to be the ideal tool for small businesses to let the world know they are out there without having to spend millions of dollars in advertising like the big corporations do. We are a really tiny entity, but with a website, a blog, an e-newsletter, and e-mail, we hope to reach lots of people. We recently sent out our first e-newsletter, which only went to our list of...
by Noel | Nov 5, 2007 | CobraHead, Gardening
I grew corn and cucumbers in this bed. It is the worst bed in the south garden in terms soil workability. It is dense yellow clay. It becomes brick hard as it dries. While years of adding compost and rotating crops though the bed have made it softer than it once was, it’s still far from friable. The nasty soil doesn’t seem to have any negative effect on the vegetables I grow. This year the corn and cukes were superb and when I do break up the clay,...
by Noel | Nov 3, 2007 | Gardening
Cucumbers, like summer squash and zucchini, can get past you if you’re not diligent. I found this one yesterday in the debris along the edge of the bed where I had planted three cucumber plants on the east side of a bed of corn. The plants were bought at the Madison farmers market. They were labeled Burpless Bush Cucumbers with no brand name of any seed company. I think they were misnamed, since they set extremely vigorous trailing vines. The fruit was short...
by Noel | Oct 31, 2007 | CobraHead, Gardening
T-posts are everywhere in my garden. They are indispensable fixtures in the system I’ve developed. They hold up my tomato cages. I make a little corral with T-posts and jute to keep the corn from blowing over. In the north beds where I have a permanent planting of asparagus, a T-post corral keeps the fronds from falling into the paths. I trellis melons and peas with T-posts and fencing. For the last three years I’ve put a fence around the entire south...