Last October mentioned garlic wife had planted wondering if it would
survive the winter cold and snow. Here it is the end of May and I
noticed wilting of a plant in a pot on the deck and I just pulled a
mature bulb from the pot.

Sometime recently you wrote:

Last October mentioned garlic wife had planted wondering if it would
survive the winter cold and snow.
I had begun to have misgivings about my ginger for the same reason
(without the snow, of course). A couple of weeks ago, I noticed green
shoots peeking up between the leaves in its tub and, 'yaay, it's
ginger. Just the grocerey store stuff and kind of bland, not spicy
hot but still pretty tasty and a lot less pricey than the current
$2.49/lb at the local off-price store.
--
Derald
USDA Zone 9b
Peninsular Florida

On Monday, May 24, 2021 at 12:52:09 PM UTC-4, Frank wrote:
Last October mentioned garlic wife had planted wondering if it would
survive the winter cold and snow. Here it is the end of May and I
noticed wilting of a plant in a pot on the deck and I just pulled a
mature bulb from the pot.

Last year we put up a hoop house over my wife's garlic row. This was a plastic sheet over seven plastic hoops anchored to the ground with sections of rebar. The whole thing was about 24 feet long, 4 feet wide, and about 2 feet high at the high point in the middle of the hoops. The garlic grew under there, undisturbed for the winter. We live in Maryland, north of Baltimore and a few miles in from Chesapeake Bay. We had a mild winter but there were a few freezing periods and some snow flurries.

We uncovered the hoop house a couple of weeks ago and the garlic were growing very well. She's harvested much of it and has it on the drying rack at the moment.

Paul

Frank wrote:
Last October mentioned garlic wife had planted wondering if it would
survive the winter cold and snow. Here it is the end of May and I
noticed wilting of a plant in a pot on the deck and I just pulled a
mature bulb from the pot.

that's pretty early!

i won't think about harvesting bulbs until the scapes start
showing up and a few of the lower leaves start to turn color.

in the meantime i have green garlic i can dig up and use.

i saw some pictures of someone's harvest of garlic from
the south that they took up a few weeks ago. to me it looked
too early and small. i hated to say anything about that so
i didn't.

as a coincidence today i used up some of the garlic i had
put into storage from last year. it was just barely accept-
able for what i was doing with it, but if i'd wanted to dry
it or grind it and freeze it i could have had a small container
of garlic from the four bulbs i had left. instead i chopped
it all up (after using what i needed) and fed it to the worms.


songbird

wrote:
Sometime recently you wrote:

Last October mentioned garlic wife had planted wondering if it would
survive the winter cold and snow.

I had begun to have misgivings about my ginger for the same reason
(without the snow, of course). A couple of weeks ago, I noticed green
shoots peeking up between the leaves in its tub and, 'yaay, it's
ginger. Just the grocerey store stuff and kind of bland, not spicy
hot but still pretty tasty and a lot less pricey than the current
$2.49/lb at the local off-price store.

fresh ginger is so different from powdered or pickled
that i consider it a whole different spice/ingredient.
so good.


songbird

On 5/24/21 4:23 PM, songbird wrote:
but if i'd wanted to dry
it or grind it and freeze it i could have had a small container
of garlic from the four bulbs i had left. instead i chopped
it all up (after using what i needed) and fed it to the worms.

Did the worms demand some oregano and parsley to
go with the garlic?

:-)

T wrote:
On 5/24/21 4:23 PM, songbird wrote:
but if i'd wanted to dry
it or grind it and freeze it i could have had a small container
of garlic from the four bulbs i had left. instead i chopped
it all up (after using what i needed) and fed it to the worms.

Did the worms demand some oregano and parsley to
go with the garlic?

:-)

they're not too picky. along with the garlic they got
carrot ends, broccoli and cauliflower stems, dried ends of
green onions and lettuce cores and leaves that were too
far gone. the buckets also had some dried up pea sprouts
that needed to be buried so that was yet another green -
they probably eat better than i do... i also have egg
shells that get included along with paper and cardboard
scraps. not much organic material gets put out with the
recycling here.


songbird

On 5/24/21 8:23 PM, songbird wrote:
T wrote:
On 5/24/21 4:23 PM, songbird wrote:
but if i'd wanted to dry
it or grind it and freeze it i could have had a small container
of garlic from the four bulbs i had left. instead i chopped
it all up (after using what i needed) and fed it to the worms.

Did the worms demand some oregano and parsley to
go with the garlic?

:-)

they're not too picky. along with the garlic they got
carrot ends, broccoli and cauliflower stems, dried ends of
green onions and lettuce cores and leaves that were too
far gone. the buckets also had some dried up pea sprouts
that needed to be buried so that was yet another green -
they probably eat better than i do... i also have egg
shells that get included along with paper and cardboard
scraps. not much organic material gets put out with the
recycling here.


songbird


Dang! A gourmet restaurant for worms. You aught to
start charging them for your services!

Wait, you already do that when you steal their
poop to fertilize your garden.

:-)

T wrote:
....
Dang! A gourmet restaurant for worms. You aught to
start charging them for your services!

Wait, you already do that when you steal their
poop to fertilize your garden.

:-)

the sad thing is that when i put them out into the
gardens only a few survive. adult worms really don't
cope well with rapid change in soil conditions on
top of the fact that many of them are not natives so
they will not survive the weather extremes.

the worms that will survive are those that are natives
and who are just about to hatch from their cocoons and
perhaps some of the smaller ones that have a chance to
acclimate.

i don't steal their poop. i just take the buckets
out and put them where i want to use their poop/pee
and then i keep a few buckets back which are used to
restart the buckets. to take the time to sift the
worms from the buckets would take way too long and i'm
not running a fancy setup where i could be more able
to let the worms migrate like some do. that's both
more expensive and takes more equipment than a simple
bucket like what i'm doing.


songbird

On 5/26/21 11:03 AM, songbird wrote:
T wrote:
...
Dang! A gourmet restaurant for worms. You aught to
start charging them for your services!

Wait, you already do that when you steal their
poop to fertilize your garden.

:-)

the sad thing is that when i put them out into the
gardens only a few survive. adult worms really don't
cope well with rapid change in soil conditions on
top of the fact that many of them are not natives so
they will not survive the weather extremes.

the worms that will survive are those that are natives
and who are just about to hatch from their cocoons and
perhaps some of the smaller ones that have a chance to
acclimate.

i don't steal their poop. i just take the buckets
out and put them where i want to use their poop/pee
and then i keep a few buckets back which are used to
restart the buckets. to take the time to sift the
worms from the buckets would take way too long and i'm
not running a fancy setup where i could be more able
to let the worms migrate like some do. that's both
more expensive and takes more equipment than a simple
bucket like what i'm doing.


songbird


They sound really pampered. I can hear the now:

Fred: slave is briging more table scraps!

Harvey: Hmmm. These vegi's taste like they
were grown in our poop.

Fred: I am pretty sure that was your poop Fred

fight ensues

One of the local's sells a quart of the stuff
for 80 U$D. That will be a cold day in ...

My ground pots now all have a single resident worm.

:-)