The garlic is in

The garlic got in a little late this year. I'm counting on a late start to winter; which has been the norm around here. There are 250-300 cloves planted. We're going with three varieties (all hard neck): Georgia Fire; Music; and German Hardy.

I only planted the left half (southern) of this bed. Our plan is to plant determinate paste tomatoes on the right half. The bed is roughly 4'x30'.  

The Garlic Harvest

This was our garlic harvest over at the community garden this year*. There are two varieties here and both are hard neck. The small bunch on the right is Georgia Fire. Maybe 10% of what we planted actually came up. We won't eat any of this and just plant it later this month. The big bunch** on the left is German Hardy. This is the third season we have planted this garlic from bulbs we bought three years ago. This stuff is awesome. We would be tempted to just plant this variety only since it does so well, but we like to have variety; so we will continue to invest maybe half to two-thirds of our garlic patch to this stuff and the rest to others.

What we'll be planting this season will be ~60 sqft of of the German Hardy, just a few square-feet of the Georgia Fire, and ~30 sqft of Music. The Music garlic will be a new addition. It's all we had when we lived in Downingtown and if we would have known how difficult it would be to get planting bulbs, we would have taken some with us when we moved. I predict that it will be as successful as the German Hardy. Fingers crossed.

*Yes, yes. I know garlic was harvested a while ago; but I have a lot of catching up to do. Who says that this stuff has to be in order?  :)

**Don't let the photo fool ya. That wheelbarrow is a Jackson (it's deep).

Little Chores

Jude is over 19 months old and his curiosities in the garden are becoming less destructive. Earlier in the season he could dig and fling dirt and that was about it. Now his fine motor skills are becoming more complex, which is allowing him to help with things like cleaning garlic. The 15-20 minutes we spent on this chore was an absolute joy. Granted, his attention span didn't allow for the full hour we needed to complete the job, but that only meant we had something to do together the next morning, and the next.

Garlic Harvest

I finally got around to pulling the garlic. It's been sitting on this screen door for a few days and the plan is to let it stay there a few more. After about a week I'll cut the stems and trim the roots and then probably let it sit a little more. In the past, our garlic seemed to get a little funky unusually early. Hardneck garlic should at  least keep until the next planting, but ours did not. My guess is that we never let it dry long enough, so this year I plan to let it sit a little longer. It's been incredibly dry and hot around here, so the conditions are perfect for this little chore.

The variety we got is called German Extra Hardy. Some of the bulbs got enormous. My plan is keep half for eating and then plant the rest. If time allows I may also get a second variety to diversify the crop a bit. We'll see.

Shoot

The garlic we planted a month ago is beginning to sprout. We went to a studio show hosted by Nell (my ceramics instructor) and used the travel opportunity to pick up a bale of straw. Hopefully tomorrow we will cover the garlic and post about Nell's chickens and our new pots.

Bare Earth and Dreams of Garlic

I had a dream about garlic. It had sprouted, but kind of funny. The shoots needed trellises. The rigging was made of layers of strings laced real low to the ground horizontally between poles on either end of the rows. I then had weave the garlic through the string like it was one of those grass placemats you'd expect to see for sale in the Keys.

Even before I woke up I knew it was a dream. I knew not because of the trelleses or the funny sprouts; I knew because we had only planted the cloves a little less than two weeks ago.

The Plan

The trees on our rented property seriously handicap our ability to properly rotate crops. Our garlic is one crop that has to be planted in the same area until we can fence the garden in. Right now the area is pretty open and we need to provide safety for our more vulnerable plants. So, in order to keep up the organic matter we developed a plan.

For the next week or two we will be running the chicken tractor* over the beds. This will help reduce the weeds and nasties in soil and also give it a nitrogen boost from their crap. Afterwards we will plant a cover crop and then turn it in when we plant more garlic in the Fall. A combination of the green manure and chicken shit should keep everything in check.

*Reduce, Reuse, Renew leaves little tolerance for those who are aesthetically driven. However, even with that said, please excuse the comedy of our fitted sheet.

The Great Garlic Harvest

Here's what our garlic patch looked like yesterday morning:


Between the dying garlic plants and the weeds threatening to eat everything, it was pretty obvious that our garlic was ready to be harvested. We planted a lot of garlic (about three pounds) last fall and were prepared for a massive harvest.

We did pretty good! Aside from a corner that the gross outdoor cats had taken to peeing on (nice, right?), from which we didn't get anything and wouldn't have eaten if we had, everything we planted grew just fine. Here's the harvest, spread out to cure, on the picnic table and benches.


All together we got about 350 cloves which weighed in at just over 25 pounds. We'll put aside about five pounds of that to replant in the fall, and the rest will be eaten--by the end of the week, if we don't restrain ourselves.

Time to Pull the Garlic

Our garlic crop is looking pretty sad these days, and as soon as the ground dries out we'll pull it all. However, we couldn't resist yanking up a bulb for dinner last night, and we were definitely pleased with how big it got. This is a variety we picked up at the Emmaus farmers market last year because we liked its color. We don't know what it is, but it tastes good.

Scape Time

Our garlic started putting up scapes a few weeks ago, and we've been harvesting them to cook with. We probably let them get too big—the conventional wisdom is that cutting scapes off will let the plant spend more energy on making a big, fat bulb of garlic—but we're lazy and they look cool. Incidentally, Patrick just put up a really interesting post about breeding garlic from seed that's worth checking out if you're interested in that kind of thing.

Holy Garlic Stink, Batman

Last night, we went through with our plan to turn some of our green garlic into pesto sauce. I cleaned a small handful of garlic—roughly the same amount as bunch of green onions from the grocery store—and chopped off both the roots and the grassy tips. I threw the garlic in our trusty Magic Bullet, along with some olive oil, a little salt and, to thin it out a bit, some water from our cooking pasta.

We put it in a pot to heat up and added some romano cheese. It looked very, very, green and it smelled deeeelicious.

Then we tasted it, and we fell to the ground and started to cry. It was insanely, tongue-burningly strong. It was intense.

Note to anyone making sauce out of green garlic: No need to use a ton of the stuff.

We poured about half of the sauce into a container to use some other time, and added a boatload of cheese and cream to the remainder with hopes of mellowing it out a bit. That did the trick. It tasted way good on pasta, and we'll zap up the rest of our early garlic crop and freeze it (in teeny tiny portions) so we can throw it on food throughout the sumer.

I kept getting whiffs of garlic today because my bookbag, which was in the kitchen while we were cooking, reeked of it.

Food!

Let the record show that this, the fourth weekend of April, 2008, marks the first time this year that we ate actual food from our garden.

This lettuce was planted last fall and survived the winter with only a couple of frostbitten outer leaves. Due to the lack of an appropriate harvest basket we jammed it into this coffee mug. It (the lettuce, not the mug) made an excellent salad for dinner last night.


This garlic was planted a year and a half ago, got swallowed whole by weeds and never harvested, and re-emerged this spring as a million little clusters of green garlic. Some of it made an appearance in our soup tonight, and the rest will be pesto by tomorrow evening.

Got deer? Got bamboo?

Then sharpen the bamboo into spears and kill the deer! Or build a fence.

Deer have been stomping around our garlic patch and threatening to turn our tidy rows of bulbs into mush. We don't really want venison that's been raised on the neighbors' ChemLawn grass and Miracle Gro shrubbery, so we decided against the sharpened spears and went with a fence instead.

There is nothing the deer particularly want from the garlic garden—it just provides a convenient shortcut for them to take when they move from chewing off the tops of our blueberry bushes to rolling around on the herbs. Our fence basically needed to provide enough of a barrier that the deer would walk around the garden rather than through it, so we planned a fence that would be tall enough to keep them from jumping over it.

The first order of business was a trip to the bamboo forest.


Bamboo will be the first thing we plant at future house. We use it for practically every single garden project we do, and it's plentiful, cheap, and pretty. The above picture was taken yesterday—while the rest of the area is still in gray and brown winter mode, the bamboo is a nice cheery green, like it always is. We chopped down about a dozen tall pieces and dragged them over to the garlic, where we proceeded to attach 6-foot bamboo poles to metal stakes and pound them into the ground around the perimeter of the garden.

Then we took looong pieces of bamboo and tied them to the uprights, parallel to the ground, so they went the whole way around the garden (minus opening we left at one corner). We ended up with sort of a bamboo split-rail fence. For extra insurance we ran pieces of twine between the bamboo, so that the deer won't be tempted to climb through the gaps.


Now, let's hope it works.

We wanted a lot of garlic this year. We ordered some from Seeds of Change, won some from a dude on eBay, bought some at a farmers' market, and were given some of this house's resident garlic (Music garlic, which has been planted here for years). All together we have:

Georgia Crystal
Russian Giant
Music
Italian
German Extra Hardy
Bogatyr
Chesnok Red
Spanish Roja
Emmaus (some mystery variety we picked up at the Emmaus Farmers' Market)

At the end of the day we had 429 cloves of garlic planted in two and a half nice, composty beds, and covered with a few inches of broken down grass clippings and old straw.

Don't be alarmed by the smoke. We had us a little old-tomato-plant-fire to keep us toasty while we planted.

We planted some of the garlic earlier in the season and just mulched it today. It's already sprouted and has made some good headway so far. The new stuff will probably sprout soon, considering the weirdo temperatures we've been having--it was 70 degrees yesterday and 40 today. Either way, we're going to be eating major amounts of garlic scapes in June and harvesting a boatload of bulbs not too long after that.

The Garlic of Education

Meg and I are always learning something new about the fascinating world of backyard food production. Recently we learned that our steps to planting garlic were a little out of order. Actually the only step that was out of place was when to add mulch. We thought that the mulch was added AFTER the garlic sprouted. This assumption was made because we were under the impression that the mulch would suffocate the garlic and keep them from sprouting. We were wrong.

Many of the garden blogs we read are talking about one of three things: frost/snow, what's in food storage, and planting garlic. While reading Tiny Farm Blog and Her Able Hands I realized that mulching your garlic beds doesn't have to wait for the shoots to show. After sharing this information with Meg we decided that we should gather some straw bales right quick. The shoots are already close to four or five inches tall and were going to be covered next week, but now it is at the top of our to-do list with a bit of fire under our asses.

I don't feel that we are too late; we waited this long last year and ended up harvesting close to 200 bulbs. However, it is a bit of a bother sifting straw between every sprout and if this helps ease the chore than I am all applause.

Garlics

Last year we chose a pretty crappy location for our garlic, and most of the bulbs we harvested were small and/or squishy. Gross. Half of it didn't even make it through the winter (despite our efforts to mulch) due to some combination of inadequate sun and the garlic's own lack of hardiness.

This year we annexed the superior upper garden, which is basically filled with pure compost, is in full sun, and has great drainage. We also paid more attention to the garlic we bought, and found varieties that can handle a decently cold and snowy Pennsylvania winter. Our garlic is going to be so awesome.

Steve-o generously tilled the garden for us, so it took practically no time to build two lovely beds.


Nice!

Last Sunday we planted 200 cloves: 50 each of Spanish Roja and Chesnok Red, and 100 of an unnamed hardneck variety we bought at the Emmaus Farmers' Market. Next week, we'll add 50 cloves of Music and 25 Russian Giant, plus some German Extra Hardy, Italian Purple, Bogatyr, Georgia Crystal and more Spanish Roja. Our 350-400 cloves will turn into 2000 cloves by next year, and you can bet we'll be reeking of it.