Garlic Planting

After the freak snowstorm of October 29, 2011, temperatures finally hit the low sixties on November 8th, 9th and 10th. The snow was almost gone except for a few patches here and there. In fact, it was the first time I can recall ever tilling snow into the soil in preparation for the garlic planting.

The German Extra Hearty garlic has been waiting patiently up in the rafters ever since harvest day back on July 24, 2011. I strung them up in bunches of ten bulbs each. They cured over a span of 15 weeks - 107 days to be exact. I fully intended to have them in the ground on October 29th, but the snow postponed the planting and had me wondering if they would be planted at all.

I pile the bundles into a wicker laundry basket (which has never been used for laundry, so I like to call it my "harvest basket") and move the operation to the front porch.

I first have to use pruning sheers to cut the dried leave stalks about an inch above the bulbs. Not a hard task but when you have to do 150+ it can get painful! I separate the smallest bulbs for eating and ready the larger bulbs for planting. Each year I see larger bulbs and cloves as the numbers grow.

This is my basket of small bulbs. While they are small, the cloves are large because this variety contains 4 cloves per bulb. There are a few (very few) exceptions with five and three cloves in a bulb. I make sure to plant cloves from the five-cloved bulbs but keep the three-cloved bulbs for eating.

On planting day, I use my thumbs to peal the outer dried skins to expose the tips of each clove. The next part isn't all that easy. Separating the cloves takes strength. Some folks use a dull, flat-head screw driver but that can damage the clove making it susceptible to disease or not to grow at all. If any clove gets a side exposed, I keep it for eating not wanting to risk a dud planting.

I planted over a two day period mainly because my thumbs were so sore from breaking up the bulbs. There are 120 cloves on the table in this photograph (about an hour's work). I planted 137 cloves the previous day.

I ordered five new varieties of garlic to plant this year. When they arrived in the mail in September and October, I stored them in the same place as my German Extra Hearty (up in the rafters). It didn't matter though. On planting day, the new varieties had moldy roots, some cloves were rotted and many others were sprouting.

New Garlic Varieties this season:

1. Siberian
2. Inchelium Red
3. Musik
4. Silver Rose
5. Duganski

I sigh to myself because that's how it starts. I received 3 bulbs of each variety, yet I had to discard about half of each. This new garlic is from a different place and is grown at different times. It will take a few years to acclimate to my growing schedule. By the way, my cured garlic, the German Extra Hearty that hung from the rafters was simply perfect, no mold, no rotting and no sprouting. I've trained it well.

I managed to plant about 400 cloves in all this season. The new varieties are seen planted on the left which I made a double row planting. The German Extra Hearty is on the right in a triple row planting. I mulch with straw to about 6 inches. If all goes well, I should see the first green sprouts in early April, 2012.

As for 2011, I ended up keeping about 85 bulbs plus any cloves too exposed to plant. I like this photograph because I can see the subtle purple blush which adds to how a perfect bulb of garlic should be.

Want some?

:)

Garlic Harvest

The garlic was ready for harvesting on Saturday, July 17th this year. All that was needed was my trusty mini-shovel to gently pry-up the earth around each plant. All 46 cloves that were planted last October came-up this spring (note that 3 of them took a month longer than the rest) for 100% success. Garlic is the ONLY garden crop that does not get attacked by ground hogs, raccoons or insects making it the easiest thing to grow.

It may not look like a lot of garlic but there're 46 bulbs along the row which have been freshly dug out of the earth.

I set the garlic bulbs on the garden work table to be lightly washed with the hose before hanging to dry.

I tie 3 bulbs together with garden suet string and let them hang to dry until it is time to re-plant in October.

If you go back to my October, 2008 blog entry, you'll see how I began with only 5 bulbs from Seed Savers. Then in July 2009, I harvested 10 garlic bulbs which yielded 47 cloves.

In October of 2009, I planted 46 cloves... And now we wait until October, 2010.

I won't know how many cloves this harvest will yield until the day of planting (you're not supposed to break-up the bulbs until planting day) but I'm guessing that it will be in the neighborhood of 216 cloves.

This is what fascinates me about gardening; I start with a small number of plants and it builds-up exponentially over only a few years.

:)