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!!!
What's this then? A thousand! Holy sheets! I just gave myself the garlic planter of the year award last week after planting 300.
You deserve that award! That's a ton of cloves to plunk into the ground!!
I'm still giggling every time I read holy sheets lol, thanks for that!
Congrats on the eventual garlic harvest of champions!!
!PIZZA
YAY! Congrats!
Interesting the alfalfa. I'm figuring my brewing grain will accomplish the same thing. I was looking at Music when we were at Snow Valley but they had none available. Looks like they are ~6 cloves per head judging by the size of the cloves? 15k cloves will take a whole lot of heads broken apart. I'll likely be heading that way myself over the next years.
!BEER
Thanks! Congrats to you too! We've got future garlics a'growin! Can you believe the deluge going on outside btw? Holy atmospheric river! I am not sad about it either, we desperately needed this moisture, I have tons of things I want to burn lol!
I'm sad you didn't find any Music, it's such a great producer, and I love the flavor! They run about 5-6ish cloves a bulb and they are chonkers!
The Hive Garlic Growers Collective is gonna be lit! (We will also have sore fingers from breaking apart all those heads lol!)
!PIZZA
Really happy the rain hit today and I got the garlic all in yesterday. Up to about .6" so far. I have a ton to burn as well.
Too bad @solominer is on the other side of the country, he got a tow behind garlic planter for the acre he wants to put into production. The #HGGC needs a community page now!
With the 13 varieties I'll have going I'm not too upset missing the Music this year. I'll be preordering next year a few more varieties from Snow Valley Garlic farm, so no waiting in a 2 hr line to buy onsite, and music is on the list to add to the mix.
Yep, the #HGGC community needs to happen, I made a note lol! We could sell seed garlic/eating garlic for HBD to people!
13 varieties! ARGH! That's fantastic! I want to add some Red Chesnok next year and there's a Polish variety who's name I can't think of that I desire to plunk into the soil too.
Two hours in line! That's garlic devotion my friend, I love the bulbs just showing up in the mail haha!
Speaking of garlic, I've got some cloves to peel and dehydrate, and today is a perfect day for that chore!
Happy burning in the next few days btw!
!PIZZA
I'm still waiting on my 3 other varieties to ship, which is SUPER nice having them appear in the mailbox. I didn't realize until standing in that line that I could have preordered... Lesson learned.
Glad you got your garlic in the ground.
Haha I would let you use it. We are looking forward to putting it to use next year.
Oh this is good to see.
I have been thinking garlic recently too and want to try planting some here. Let's see how yours goes.
I hope you get to plant some, garlic is just the best!!
!PIZZA
I'm hoping to plant mine on Thursday and Friday. I try to plant the first week of October, but alas...
I hope that you get perfectly pleasant planting weather!
Columbus Day is the typical planting date around here, but it was just too warm until recently.
And I hope you are feeling better, dangit!!
!PIZZA
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I may have as many as 3 dozen cloves of seed garlic to plant. Not very impressive! And I haven't done it yet. What on earth are you going to do with all that garlic?