today i started to get the garlic for next
summer harvest planted. i may be a little
early, but i'm hoping it won't make that
much difference.

based upon results from this last garlic
season i selected out 200 large cloves and
most will be planted in similar soil to what
i had the best results.

no clay no more. the quality was ok, the
size was somewhat smaller (the largest bulbs
were about 3/4 the size if the non-clay
plantings), but the work to get them out of
the ground is too much and depends upon the
weather more than i'd like. we were stuck
on garlic harvesting for a few days until some
rain came along. i'd tried to harvest without
the rain but after a few clumps it was not
something i'd have been able to keep doing
without a jackhammer or some other major
source of ground breaking. which would have
destroyed the patch it was planted in.

also in the clay the garlic had either
birdsfoot trefoil or alfalfa as a cover. i
think the net result was a wash. the less
sunlight and competition for water was
probably offet by there being more nitrogen
in the soil. i could not tell exactly for
sure as i didn't weigh or measure nor could
i really control for moisture. so while the
garlic grown in the clay with the cover crops
would be sustainable, it would take some
kind of reworking to get more organic material
on a regular basis down deep enough in the
clay so that you could get the bulbs harvested
without resorting to dynomite, pick axes or
waiting for rain to soften up the ground a bit.

in contrast the clay in the sandy loam were
mostly harvested by tugging them out of the
ground with one hand. only a few needed much
more than that and it was done all with a small
hand trowel (instead of stomping on a shovel
with both feet after hopping up into the air
and that was only going about 1" into the clay
when it was dry).

guess where those 200 cloves are going?
i'm about halfway done planting the garlic and
then when the garlic is in i'll put peas/peapods
over them as a cover crop for the fall/winter.
before planting i weighed the cloves i planted so
that i can get a resulting weight difference.
about 2lbs of garlic. unfortunately i have yet
to find a scale for more accurate weighing...

the fun continues.


songbird

On Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:58:15 -0500, Derald wrote:

songbird wrote:

guess where those 200 cloves are going?
i'm about halfway done planting the garlic and
then when the garlic is in i'll put peas/peapods
over them as a cover crop for the fall/winter.
before planting i weighed the cloves i planted so
that i can get a resulting weight difference.
about 2lbs of garlic. unfortunately i have yet
to find a scale for more accurate weighing...

the fun continues.
2011-12 was my first real attempt at garlic growing. In November,
planted a pound (Inchelium red) that came from Wisconsin. Half of it had
two months' induced "vernalization" at near-freezing. The vernalized
garlic was ready to harvest in June. Good but small heads. Believe me,
I've been thoroughly educated by "the cook". It seems further reading
about garlic nutrition might be wise, LOL! At any rate, the other garlic
persisted into July and came to nothing.
For 2012-12, purchased a pound each of "Inchelium red" and "Ajo
rojo" from a grower in Texas. Expecting delivery by late July, I first
found out the "Ajo rojo" is not available this year and, more recently,
received notice of a crop failure ("a warm winter and tons of rain", he
wrote): No garlic being shipped. Bummer.
Accepted his offer to provide garlic from a third-party because
it's far too late to shop elsewhere. I neglected to determine whether
and can only hope that it'll be from the south or southeastern US.
Anyway, here it is late August and I have no garlic in the 'fridge
as I'd hoped to have by now (sigh).


My first garlic crop was from Gilroy garlic at Costco. It did fine
and I kept some of the larger cloves and planted them. Have continued
that for several years now and I get a good crop each year. I guess
by now the stuff is acclimated to my climate.
--
USA
North Carolina Foothills
USDA Zone 7a
To find your extension office
http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/index.html

In article ,
Derald wrote:
"grown in Texas" (instead of Wisonsin), is a little bit of a leg up.

Got a farmers market? Grown in Florida would be better for you, eh?
Watch out for the "farmer's market" vendors that don't actually grow
what they sell, of course.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away.

Derald wrote:
....

welcome back to the funny farm.


2011-12 was my first real attempt at garlic growing. In November,
planted a pound (Inchelium red) that came from Wisconsin. Half of it had
two months' induced "vernalization" at near-freezing. The vernalized
garlic was ready to harvest in June. Good but small heads. Believe me,
I've been thoroughly educated by "the cook".

she doesn't like peeling a lot of small cloves?

i'm tempted to take some of the bulbules and
roast them and then try to press them out of their
peels to see if that will work. the other alternative
is to grind them all in the blender with some liquid
and then filter it off for the juice, but then
there is the problem of figuring out a good way
to put that juice up to keep it. i was thinking
a good ginger/garlic and chinese spices of some
kind type of sauce/jam/relish. i'll probably have
10lbs of these alone. some of the bulbules are
bigger than the actual garlic head it came from.

someone we know was rather amazed that the
garlic they have been growing for many years
actually had a bulb in the ground. they never
harvested and divided it. instead they kept
picking the tops and used that. i showed them
an entire plant and they took it to show the
others... got a good laugh out of that one.


It seems further reading
about garlic nutrition might be wise, LOL! At any rate, the other garlic
persisted into July and came to nothing.

huh.


For 2012-12, purchased a pound each of "Inchelium red" and "Ajo
rojo" from a grower in Texas. Expecting delivery by late July, I first
found out the "Ajo rojo" is not available this year and, more recently,
received notice of a crop failure ("a warm winter and tons of rain", he
wrote): No garlic being shipped. Bummer.
Accepted his offer to provide garlic from a third-party because
it's far too late to shop elsewhere. I neglected to determine whether
and can only hope that it'll be from the south or southeastern US.
Anyway, here it is late August and I have no garlic in the 'fridge
as I'd hoped to have by now (sigh).

send me your shipping address and i'll send you
a handful of the largest cloves i have left. we'll
see how it does down there. i'm always up for a
bit of fun. it is a hardnecked garlic but
you are speaking of refrigerating. might do ok...


songbird

In article ,
songbird wrote:
i'm tempted to take some of the bulbules and
roast them and then try to press them out of their
peels to see if that will work.

But those are good to plant. At least one thing (ontario canada garlic
will probably find it via web search) claims that planting them
"rejuvenates" (nicely vague) the resulting bulbs/cloves for further
generations. In any case, they will, depending on size (I have quite
large ones from "Spanish Roja") either produce a new head, or a single
giant clove (aka "round" & poplar with those who hate to peel when using
large quantities of garlic) which if planted again rather than eaten
will then make a head.

The ones that start tiny may take a few years of replanting - I'll be
surprised if I don't get heads out of the 60 I'm saving for the garden
next year (ie, to plant as soon as I have space cleared this year),
since they are nearly the size of some of the cloves from the largest
heads (some of the smaller bulbils have gone into the woods, after I
noticed a garlic happily growing where I would never have thought to
plant one - in the shady woods just off the deck, near where I clean the
stuff.) I gave 197 medium ones to someone else to get a start on this
variety of garlic.

My mutt garlic sometimes has no top bulbs, or gets pregnant in the stem
(not like a scape), where the Spanish Roja (new to me this year) has a
more classic scape arrangement. After doing a bit of research this
spring I let them all go, since one of the few people who had actually
done a side-by-side test got more garlic from the ones they left the
scapes on, and other than people blindly repeating (without evidence)
the "common knowledge" that cutting the scapes off "forced more energy
into the bulb" most other things said it was a wash either way - i.e.,
did not matter. So, I'm only going to cut them off if I'm eating them,
unless I feel all scientific one year and do my own randomized test.

--
Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by
Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away.