It is finished! YAY!
Why am I so Kat-lated you might be wondering? Well my dear frens, the garlic is all planted! SQUEE MCGEE!
All 1000 cloves of it!
That's about ten pounds of seed garlic, and what's even cooler is that I grew about half of that.
For those who don't know, seed garlic is SUPER expensive, so for the past few years I have been expanding my stock. I buy some seed garlic every year from Filaree Garlic Farm in Northeast Washington state and also plant what I grow and save.
After a lot of hard work, perseverance, and harvest blessings, I am getting somewhere.
You see, my place is a kinda harsh place to grow most things. Potatoes grow well here, and I am pretty proficient at pumpkins and tomatoes now, but holy dogwarts does garlic ever grow well here!
Okay, there is a bit of input, but still, I absolutely love something that you plunk into the ground and it grows all winter long. Not only that, garlic seems to not care about our often fickle spring and summer weather (It can be freezing and scorching all in the same day) and just produces like a champ.
So, I am growing what I know. And what seems to do well here.
My goal is to get to a minimum of a half an acre of garlic in production. As of yesterday, my 1000 cloves gave me six, seventy-five foot rows with 6 inch spacing, so by my calculations, I could possibly get to my goal next planting year if I splurge on a respectable bit on seed garlic.
That said, what I am going to splurge on is a planter to tow behind an ATV or my lawnmower, because the hubs and I crawled around like a bunch of non-exuberant toddlers and planted the whole shebang by hand yesterday. 1000 cloves is not too much, but since we will be working up to 15-30K cloves, I'm going to acquire some back and knee saving equipment.
Anyway, back to the garlic.
Out of all of the cultivars I have tried over the years, the variety Music has thrived on the farm. So this year's big crop is all Music all the time. The day before planting the hubs and I sat in our chairs in front of the wood stove and broke apart all the bulbs, which was a pretty pleasant task.
Yesterday, it was a balmy 60 degrees Fahrenheit, so out we went with all the cloves in buckets. Of course we were accompanied by our usual herd of supervisory animals, the corg, the Flabbins, and miscellaneous felines. It was a garlic parade.
After marking out the rows, furrowing them, planting the cloves, and covering them, we still had more than a bit of work to do.
The hubs hopped on the tractor and he and I went to collect our secret bulb growth weapon and straw bales from the barn. And more than a few step-in fence posts.
The first order of business was to spread an entire 40lb bag of organic alfalfa pellets over the freshly planted garlic area. Last year I experimented with applying alfalfa pellets at planting time, they were the perfect slow release nitrogen for the developing garlic, I was super pleased with my resulting bulb size the following July!
After applying the pellets, I spread a cozy layer of straw over the crop while the hubs set up a turkey deterrent. We have so many turkeys now, and turkeys, they like to scratch the ground. The last thing I need is the 50-75 turkeys we have lurking to scratch out my entire garlic crop. I hope the netting fence keeps this from happening.
Finally, the job was finished and the hubs and I went in the house and whipped up a fine meal of sesame chicken and sticky white rice. We both were more than a bit tired, but truly happy all the same, as we both know that next July there will be around a thousand bulbs of garlic to pull!!!
