by Noel | Oct 25, 2022 | CobraHead, Gardening
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that potatoes may not be the best value for work input for a home grower. High-quality organic potatoes from the market are quite inexpensive, and certainly a better pure cost value than our homegrown spuds. However, I have no doubt that planting two beds of potatoes every year is a good fit for my garden. Potatoes are usually a very reliable crop. I’ve got my planting scheme down, and I see the rotation of potato beds through the...
by Noel | Sep 17, 2020 | CobraHead, Garden Tools, Gardening, Vegetable Growing
Potato Bed. Cold and soggy weather deterred gardening for nearly a week. It’s warmer now and drying up, a good time to finish digging up a potato bed that was already mostly harvested. Digging Potatoes. About a third of the bed was left to dig. Harvesting was not difficult, I used a broadfork to loosen all the edges, and then down on my hands and knees with my CobraHead Original to do all the digging. A Seam of Potatoes The potatoes had been planted in...
by Noel | Jan 28, 2017 | CobraHead, Gardening
It’s the end of January. We still have a lot of potatoes stored in the barn. Barn temperatures are often well below freezing but the potatoes are in good shape. Last fall, before I put the potatoes in storage, I modified my straw bale walls and replaced the bales on top with insulating foam panels. It was a good move. It’s way easier sliding off panels than wrestling straw bales when you need some potatoes. The barn stays cleaner and the potatoes seem to be...
by Noel | Dec 15, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
The 2015 CobraHead Home Garden was a great success. The garden is never the same from year to year. Weather, seed and plant inputs, labor, luck, and a lot of other variables make each garden season a new experience. That’s an advantage for home gardeners. They don’t need perfection to be successful, and last year’s errors are only lessons for the future. I like to tell beginning gardeners not to worry. Plant enough different stuff and some of it will turn...
by Noel | Nov 19, 2015 | CobraHead, Gardening
We had a huge potato harvest as the result of growing three beds rather than two and using seed potatoes from Wood Prairie Farm that gave us a much greater yield than previous seed sources. We ended up with over 300 pounds of potatoes from a 30 pound planting. I knew that if we didn’t find better storage than the basement, we would lose a lot of crop, so I made a quick cold storage set-up out of straw bales and an old wooden shipping crate. Using a small stall in...
