grow garlic

Every clove I planted has come up. Plus an extra one. Surprise!

Got some guidance off the Internet, plopped them in the ground. Fingers are crossed.

Bought the sets for the garlic. But I suppose carrying them around in my knapsack isn’t going to do me much good.

My local nursery won’t have sets available until October.

I have some in the ground. I’m not sure I planted it at a good time, nor if it’s had enough water (before the snow). I suppose time will tell.

The ground in the raised bed was still mostly frozen at 2 pm today. I was able to dig & loosen the part that was in the sun, but not the rest of it. As a result, only 1/3 of the garlic got planted… but, that’s how it goes when you are two months late in planting!

I did, however, rig up wire fencing so that the chickens can’t get in there. Now I need to build a box or something to keep them out of the ground so I can plant the rest in the ground in another bed.

All cured and cut and cleaned. I left one that “split” while in the ground to continue growing and see what would happen. It wasn’t going to produce a good bulb for eating, so I thought, why not. Now it’s two little scapes (one from each stalk) are fat and round and the outer paper is starting to split. I’ve never seen the “flower” of a garlic bulb before – have to remember to take pictures for my blog. The “flower” is really a bunch of tiny “bulbils,” not real flowers, and in theory, you can plant them and in several years you will have harvest size garlic. Still, they look like flowers, so people often refer to them as flowers.

• Siberian still the no. 1 producer
• Polish also did very well, as well as Georgia Crystal (from the state of Georgia in Russia)
• The non-hard neck “bonus” that www.thegarlicstore.com sent me did OK (Kettle River Giant), but not as well as any of the hard-necks

Looks like I’ve found my two types of garlic to grow: Siberian and Georgia Crystal. Both hard-necks from Russia that can take our cold and my “mostly neglect” method of raising them. Siberian has purple striped wrappers and the Georgia Crystal is white papered, so it will be easy to tell which is which. So, for the fall 2008 planting season, I have finally determined which varieties to specialize in. So, I will go ahead and buy my planting stock for this fall, but after that, I should be able to just continue to perpetuate these two varieties from my own stock. I’m really looking forward to this tiny bit of self-sufficiency.

• Creating the initial beds is quite time consuming but is a long term investment in my whole garden rotation, so I’m not really going to count that – but it takes several hours
• Planting 100 cloves took about 1 hour spread over a few days
• Mulching for winter took about 2 hours over the course of the whole winter
• Watering (which is like therapy to me) took about 5 hours over the course of the winter and spring
• Inspecting for and cutting scapes, maybe an hour for the season
• Inspecting for and harvesting – a few hours over 3 or 4 weeks
• Curing – they take a while, but they do it all themselves – turning them around for even drying, maybe an hour over 3 or 4 weeks

So maybe 15 hours spread out from October to late June – a bit more than 1 1/2 hours a month for a harvest of 80-100 bulbs of garlic. Cost was $60 for planting stock = 75 cents per bulb at 80 bulbs… less if I get more than 80 good ones… I don’t count the labor costs as the labor is more like therapy and I enjoy it.

So, inspite of long, wet, icky spring, the garlic seems to be progressing towards being ready for harvest in mid June just as in better years. Garlic – stinky and unstopable – I love it!

Can’t wait! Can’t wait!