Recently, CobraHead teamed up with Singing Rooster Coffee and Just Coffee to support rural development in Haiti. Singing Rooster has already been working with small farmers in rural Haiti. They bring Haitian grown coffee to the U.S. and work to get Haitian coffee (which is very good) established here. With the devastation in Port au Prince, many Haitians are returning to small towns and will likely be getting back to growing food. Through Singing Rooster, we are sending a lot of CobraHeads to Haiti to help with the gardening programs to be established there.

Of course, in the short term lots of emergency help is still needed. Partners in Health has a proven track record in this regard. Last week, we helped host a fundraiser in Austin for Better Future International-Haiti. DJ Chorizo Funk kept the spirits high.

CobraHead supports helping people grow their own food. It's part of our mission, and we are pretty sure that small-scale growing is actually the future of agriculture. We are happy that we can help in Haiti, and we are always looking for venues where we can share our gardening tools and expertise with others.

It helps to have a plan. For business, for life in general, and certainly for growing plants to eat, planning gives you some control of the future. January is planning month for lots of northern gardeners. My planning includes going though several favorite seed catalogs and ordering seeds to replenish any in short supply in my seed inventory.

I also start looking at what is going to be planted where. In January, I print out two new charts for my south and north garden beds and start to pencil in the plan of crops and their locations. The charts go back to 1986, but it's really the last seven years I care about. I use previous years' charts to help maintain a rotation that I took from Eliot Coleman's book, The New Organic Grower.

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After a record hot summer with virtually no rain, this has been a most perfect fall for gardening. Right now I am enjoying sugar snap peas, cilantro, Japanese mustard greens, pole beans and radishes. Broccoli, broccoli raab and tatsoi will be in full production soon.


Cascade pole beans

I use a raised bed gardening system similar to the one presented in the John Jeavons book How to Grow More Vegetables. I learned how to create raised beds through a two year apprenticeship that I did with Bruce Blevins at Nokomis Gardens, East Troy, Wisconsin. Bruce studied under Alan Chadwick shortly before Chadwick's death. Chadwick brought the "French-intensive" method of gardening to UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960s. Bruce also passed on some of the other aspects of the Chadwick experience by making us learn garden related poetry. One of my favorite passages is from Romeo and Juliet: (Mickle means great):

O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities:
For naught so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence, and medicine power:

My garden beds would be better described as deeply dug rather than raised. The top of the bed only reaches a few inches above the surrounding ground and I don't use any type of structure to contain them. Double digging involves removing a layer of topsoil, loosening the subsoil with a digging fork, and then replacing the topsoil.


Just Planted Bed September 6

Seedling emerging a few days later

Double digging has been criticized for overly working the soil and potentially damaging soil structure. Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis point out in their book Teaming with Microbes, that excessive tillage can destroy the large formations of soil fungi naturally present in some soils. I take these considerations to heart, but I also find that a one time initial double digging of the east Austin clay soil that I have in my backyard makes a tremendous difference in the productivity of the garden.

I make the beds no wider than I can reach from the pathway, so there is no need to ever step in the beds and re-compact the soil. With successive plantings I find that loosening the soil with a Bio-Fork and a digging fork to be sufficient. The Bio-Fork is a two-handed digging fork with ten inch tines used exclusively for loosening soil. In Noel's gardening system both potatoes and sweet potatoes play an important role in the crop rotation and by harvesting these vegetables the beds are effectively dug rather deeply.


Bio-Fork

Since I don't grow anything in the pathways I use a flat shovel to skim off the top two to three inches of topsoil and throw it onto the beds. I use CobraHead® Long Handle to shape the beds and since rainfall is an issue in central Texas, I make a slight lip around the edge. Bruce taught me to be precise about the width of the bed so I use string lines to keep the beds at exactly 50 inches wide. At 6'5" I could probably make the beds a little wider, but I have stuck with this size. I keep the pathways just wide enough so that I can get in between the beds comfortably without my size 14 boots accidentally trampling my dinner.


Early October

I have recently taken to mulching the pathways between the beds with pine straw. I do this in part for weed control, but mostly to keep my feet from getting muddy when I go out to harvest some greens or herbs when I am cooking.

Raised beds offer many advantages, but one of the biggest is that I get a lot of produce from a compact area, therefore I don't have to weed or water an extensive area. Given how much that I travel to promote CobraHead garden tools, this really helps me keep my garden from getting out of control.

We began developing a long-handled CobraHead soon after we introduced our original CobraHead Weeder and Cultivator. It quite honestly was a reaction to older gardeners who at trade shows kept telling us, "that looks great, but I need it on a long handle." When we got serious about making a long tool, we realized that just sticking the CobraHead blade on a hoe handle was not going to produce a very effective tool. We tested many blade shape configurations before we determined that positioning the blade so it was perpendicular to the handle gave us a totally new tool that was a useful device for gardeners of all ages and a vast improvement over similar narrow bladed tools that were previously marketed.

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We attended the Garden Writers Association 61st Annual Symposium in Raleigh , North Carolina, last week. It was CobraHead's 6th GWA, and our fifth as an exhibitor.

Here's Anneliese putting the final touches on our booth. The symposium includes a trade show, seminars, speakers, tours, dinners, and awards. It is held in a different city every year, and tours of both public and private local gardens are a big part of the trip

Pictures from the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University. A truly outstanding public garden and arboretum.

These are from Montrose , a former estate of a governor of North Carolina, William Alexander Graham, now a foundation maintained by Nancy and Craufurd Goodwin.

S.E.E.D.S. , is a community garden project in inner city Durham that teaches people to grow food and care for the earth. The young people are paid interns and the food grown is sold at the facility. They were harvesting sweet potatoes while we were there. The second shot is of a green roof project constructed on the site.

On Sunday our tour had a mis-adventure as our bus slid off a driveway and got hung up.

Touring the Wal-Mart garden center in Mt. Olive was not on the agenda, but here's the group at the big box waiting for a replacement bus. The bus mishap put a damper on the last day's fun as we missed several of the scheduled stops, but overall, the trip and trade show were excellent.

Next year the symposium is in Dallas and the organizers promise another excellent show. GWA is as close to a vacation as Judy and I get since we started CobraHead. So we are looking forward to the gardens of the big D.

We continue to do a lot of trade shows, trying get our tools known by the gardening public. We've found that small shows can be more attractive than large ones, especially if the ratio of hands-on gardeners to the overall attendance is good. Big shows attended by the general populace are not for us. County fairs, street fairs, and music festivals are now on our "do not even think about it" list.

We do well at energy shows that that have an overall sustainable living slant and at small, food-oriented shows where products produced by small growers (usually organic) are featured. What we are finding is that gardeners attend these shows and if there are gardeners present, we can sell CobraHeads.

Last weekend we did the Illinois Renewable Energy Association Fair in Oregon, Illinois.

Here is Judy doing a demonstration. This was the 8th IREA and our second. It is patterned after the very large Midwest Renewable Energy Association show in Wisconsin which we also do. The show draws about 7,000 people over two days.

The Minnesota Garlic Festival, now in Hutchinson, Minnesota had its fourth show this weekend. It was our second. Pictured is Joel Girardin, a long time garlic grower at his booth.

Here are Judy and her sister Diana eating garlic ice cream. It's actually pretty good! So are the garlic chocolate chip cookies and all the garlic-laced food sold at "The Great Scape Café". The one day garlic show draws just over 2,000 people, and for such a small show, we sell enough product to make it worth our while. Again, its because so many of the people attending are gardeners.

Judy and I returned to the Kickapoo Country Fair in La Farge, Wisconsin for another show Saturday and yesterday. We did our first show there, last year, which you can read about here. The fair is about farming and smaller organic family farms, versus the corporate factory farms that now dominate world agriculture.

The show was noticeably bigger this year than last. More exhibits, more workshops, more vendors and bigger crowds. I think, if they stay on track, Kickapoo will become a major event for promoting the ideals of organic farming and sustainable living. A large field of sunflowers greeted us when we entered the grounds of Organic Valley Headquarters. The sunflowers are part of an experiment in bio-diesel fuel.

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This weekend Judy and I were CobraHead Exhibitors at the Midwest Renewable Energy Association's 20th annual energy fair in Custer, Wisconsin. It is the largest show of this type in the U.S. This was our third year at the show. We sell lots of garden tools. In fact it is a way better show for sales than almost any garden or flower show we do.

The reason is the audience. MREA attracts people with interest in sustainable energy. They have a very high awareness of what is really "green". Thus there are lots of gardeners and small farmers. Overall, the people are way hipper than the average show crowd when it comes to environmental issues and a knowledge of food and gardening.

All aspects of renewable energy and sustainability are represented in vendor exhibits, workshops, and talks and keynote addresses. The three day show also has some excellent food vendors including the Wisconsin staple - beer - by a great and "green" local brewery, Central Waters Brewing Company, and good entertainment. Saturday night we saw Michelle Shocked and I immediately became a fan.

Here's Judy trying to make a sale.

Solar is cool! Pictured are a vendor of panels, a huge solar cooker designed for villages where there is no firewood, and a solar powered water heater.

Wind power for home, farm, commercial, and community was represented.

This experimental house features locally produced inputs and is super energy efficient.

The big boys like Toyota attend the show and don't pass up an opportunity to show off their energy efficient vehicles.

But the home enthusiast modified Mercedes that runs on vegetable oil is in many ways more interesting.

My favorite vehicle – an Allis-Chalmers "G" tractor modified to be solar powered. No gas fumes in this farmer's organic veggies.

I was very excited to see this video today. It was made by Shawna Coronado, a Chicago area gardener and writer. Here is the link to her blog, The Casual Gardener, where she first posted the video. Shawna also has a website and book called Gardening Nude, which is not at all about stripping off your clothes in the garden. In actuality, it features tips on making healthier and greener gardening and lifestyle choices.

I first met Shawna back in March when Geoff and I exhibited at the Chicagoland Flower and Garden Show, where she picked up a CobraHead from us. I got to know Shawna a little bit better when we both attended the Chicago Garden Bloggers Spring Fling last month. She's a really cool, laid-back person, and it's obvious from talking to her, reading her blogs, and watching her videos that she's trying to make a positive difference in the world and encourage others to do so as well.

I'm really beginning to see positive results of covering the beds with leaves in the fall. I've been pretty diligent about doing this for the last five years. This picture shows a bed I just cleaned off. It is almost totally weed free, and the few weeds that have sprouted are easily removed.

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This weekend saw three-fourths of the CobraHead Team working the Madison Garden Expo in our home city. The event is sponsored by Wisconsin Public Television and I can say with certainty, as we've now got over two hundred trade shows behind us, this is one of the better garden shows in the United States.

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