Garden Tool Maintenance

Maintaining sharp edges on your garden tools makes digging, hoeing, chopping and slicing easier, and makes gardening more fun.  A 10” Mill Bastard file is a good all purpose file that can sharpen most of the tools in the shed, even the lawnmower blade. Remember to sharpen only the beveled side of the edge ( angled side ), applying pressure as you push the file forward, and lifting up as you draw it back. 

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Serious About Growing : The Cotswold School Garden Club

Cotswold school’s garden beds sit right out in front, but are easy to miss if you don’t know where to look.  There is no wood framing, just a series of humble mounds of soil placed far enough apart so that the first graders don’t dare mistake the third grade bed for their own.  I knew when the husky kid in the Green Bay Packers jersey correctly explained the difference between a spade and a shovel, that the Cotswold School Garden Club was serious about growing.

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Raising Chickens in Southpark

“Mom, I promise I’ll take care of them.” Insisted Gil, this time with even more conviction. Margaret weighed pros and cons of keeping chickens in the suburbs while the three baby chicks peeped up at her from a box in the garage. What began as a school science project - hatching baby chicks safely in the confines of the classroom – was about to turn into something more involved.

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Cooking with Mushrooms

Shiitake (she-tah-key) mushrooms have been cultivated in the East for hundreds of  years, and were once saved for use only by emperors, and fiercely guarded by Samurai.  Like most mushroom varieties, Shiiitake have very few calories, but are much higher in protein and other nutrients like calcium and iron, than other edible mushrooms.  They are often served in soups and as an ingredient in steamed and simmered recipes.  Many recipes call for the removal of the stems simply because they are hardeer and take longer to cook than the caps. Log grown shiitake will stay fresh in the refrigerator if wrapped loosely in a moist paper towel, and placed in an unsealed plastic bag.

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WCNC-36 Anchor Bobby Sisk no stranger to farming

It’s hard to imagine WCNC-36’s polished anchor, Bobby Sisk, working on a farm, but he’s done it. In fact the veteran TV personality actually walked a mule driven plow through his grandfather’s farm as a boy in Arkansas. It was the Microfarm lawn signs, popping up all around town like bright red radishes, that got his attention, and a few minutes in our online photo gallery that inspired the story that aired on December 23, during WCNC-TV’s 6pm newscast. 

Click Here to see the archived news story on WCNC.com