Growing Food: It's Garlic Time!

Did you know that garlic is actually planted in the fall? It is! And we did it! Let's talk about that, shall we?

First, I have to tell you that El Rey de Ajo has been dethroned. Due to many events of an unfortunate nature--most recently a filthy thieving (literal) rat that carried away every single bit of A.'s garlic seed stock--we didn't have any of our own garlic to re-plant this year. So I bought some, and we're going to start over.

The heads of seed garlic I bought ended up giving us about three dozen cloves to plant. That's a very small planting for us, but the nice thing about garlic is that each of those cloves will produce an entire head of garlic next year. That means that every year, garlic at least quadruples itself.

A., as always, did all the shovel work for our planting.

Well, this is actually the hoeing part, which he also did.

It had been some time since this bed had gotten a good application of manure, so he also added layers of horse manure to each row. He put it both underneath the garlic cloves before they were covered, and then on top of the whole bed.

The garlic was much more obvious in real life than it is in the photo.

We also had a dozen shallots that I think A. brought home from the MiL's garden. We planted those, too. And then we covered up the whole deal with cattle panels, because the dogs and chickens just love freshly dug soil and would almost certainly dig all of that bed up without some kind of deterrent there.

One nice thing about gardening here is that the ground never really freezes. At least, not in the sunny parts of the garden. The sun is too strong and the soil is so light and dry that it just can't really freeze hard. This means that we can plant all winter if we want to.

We might put in some potatoes next. We never get very many to harvest from our potato plantings, but they're fun to grow anyway.