Garlic

My garlic had been drying in our bike shed for three weeks. The occasional dirt shower had to be endured as we got our bikes out to use. All the appropriate vampire jokes were told. But it was time to cut the garlic down and finally clean it up and put it in storage. Going down to my basement when I run out of garlic is so much easier than running to the bike shed.

The yield wasn't spectacular. Out of the five years I have had this garden, it ranks fourth in production. I did get some nice bulbs, but I also got a lot of small bulbs. Above is the range from big to small. The big was 2.6 oz and the small was 1 oz. While it isn't a huge yield, it is more than enough for me. And to share. I dumped about six bulbs on my townhouse mates' counter. I'm sure they will eat a lot more of it over time. I grow way more than I can eat.

Garlic

I think this year may be the latest year for harvesting garlic. I still only have about 1-3 dead leaves on the bottom. I don't mind waiting until three leaves on all of them are brown. But the leaves at the top seemed to be getting brown faster than the ones on the bottom. That's not good. So I picked them all.

I had a good amount of large heads this year. I think I'll end up with better numbers than last year. Which is good as my townhouse mates can eat garlic like it is going out of style. I think they eat more of my harvest then I do.

I left the garlic to dry off for the morning on the brick path. I wanted to get the soil dry so I could knock most of it off.

For the next two to three weeks it will be drying in the shed. Usually I start to hear vampire jokes at this time as the shed reeks of garlic. I might nab a head or two before they are done drying if I need them for the kitchen.

Now I have part of a bed that is empty. My schedule says that I'll be planting mustard in here. Part of me wants to change that and plant bok choy. But I'm not sure what would be more useful. I liked the idea of mustard as I put carrot in this bed next year, but the mustard did not keep down the nematodes like I was hoping. And they attracted cutworms which cut down my carrot production. Maybe I'll think about it for a day or two as I let the neighborhood birds eat any bugs in the bed.

Farther back in the bed are my onions. The garlic was pretty late to die back this year. But the onions were knocked down by the wind a bit early this year. The only onions down are the Copra, my main storage onion. Not all of them are down, but most of them are. In addition the Camelot shallots are also partly down. In another week I'll have to think about building my drying rack over the compost/leaf bins.

Taking Stock

I went out yesterday and it really did feel like spring. Even the daffodils have started to push out of the soil. Which means it was time to start planting as long as the ground was unfrozen. I'll get to that last part tomorrow, but for now I'll go through the state of the perennials and overwintered crops.

First up is the spinach. It had survived well. Many of the older leaves were dead, but the new ones were starting. They looked better than I expected after being buried in 6' of snow (I shovel the path onto their bed and the snow from the solar panels on the roof comes down on top of them, so they get a lot of heavy heavy snow on top of them).

The dwarf curly kale always seems to do well. And they all survived. I don't eat those old leaves, but new ones will start to grow soon. Sadly the mache looks pretty ragged. If it doesn't grow new leaves before it bolts, I won't be eating it.

The Winterbor kale looks pretty sad. It isn't totally dead. Only time will tell if I get anything edible out of it this year.

The garlic has started to come up. The grid looks perfect, so most if not all of the plants survived. Those are the only overwintered plants in the garden. I do have a lot of perennials - mainly herbs in the garden.

Many of my herbs are in the herb circle (chives, oregano, English thyme, garlic chives, savory, and sage). I did a quick clean up of the bed. I used the garlic chives stems to help mulch the ground as otherwise the cats will dig in it. I cut the sage way back. I think this year I need to get a circular support for it. Otherwise it drapes itself over other parts of the circle and kills the herbs there.

The big question every year for me is if my rosemary has survived or not. And I'm really not sure yet. It has faded quite a bit. I'm in zone 6b and rosemary is not hardy here. I use Arp which is a hardier rosemary, but not reliably hardy. I used to have four plants scattered around the yard. This is the only surviving one. To keep it going I really need to scatter more around. And as you can see the sage plant nearby is leaning over it. I have four sage plants scattered around the garden. At the start they would die off often, but I think I've finally gotten them in places they like. Which is good as we go through a lot of sage every year.

The French thyme has survived well here. It wasn't very happy in the herb circle so I took a cutting and put one here. It likes the location because it has winter protection. I prop the garden gate open in the winter and it goes right in front of the thyme. This keeps the wind off of it. Usually French thyme is harder to keep going than English thyme, but it seems a lot healthier than my English thyme in the herb circle. The pots above are my mints. I don't see any growth out of them yet, but I'm sure they are alive. Can you kill a mint?

My tarragon lives next to a current plant. I cleaned up the dead branches and leaves. I see small shoots coming up underneath so they are doing well. I don't use a lot of tarragon in my cooking, but enough that I need to grow it.

And last but not least, my rhubarb is coming up. I'll have to think about what I'm going to do with it this year. I've taken a lot of the sugar out of my diet and you really can't eat rhubarb without sugar. I could make some rhubarb butter for the neighbors again. That was so so good. And I can eat the leftover bits. Yum.

Tomorrow I'll talk about my first plantings. I was so excited to find soil that was unfrozen. Whoohoo! I love spring. Sadly the forecast has three days of dismal cool temps, with highs in the 40s, but the weathermen assure me that it will warm up on Friday and it will even feel like spring. I'll be able to garden in a sunhat instead of a fleece cap and coat. Time to get dirt under my fingernails.

Getting There

I had a long list of things to do. It isn't complete yet, but it is getting there. I finished sifting all the leaf mold. Yesterday I cleaned out three of the beds and put on compost. Today I did the last two that needed to be cleaned up for now and covered them up too - with compost and bird netting to keep the cats away. Half the beds are totally cleaned up now and a couple are half done, but still have some small harvests left.

In addition I got all the chard frozen. I left them in as they might still produce. Doubtful, but you never know what the weather will bring. Sometimes we are frozen or snowy by mid November, but not always. I've completed half the kale, but the other half is still to go. Kale is a slow process. I've got aphids in there. Not a ton, but enough. They tend to be in clumps, but I have to go through them and clean them really well.

I still have things on the list. I need to get out and pick most of the parsley and cilantro and freeze them. I need to clean up the front zinnias that are dead (the ones in the garden are still going strong). Sunday I need to collect leaves for next year's compost. At least nothing is horribly urgent anymore.

And I thought I was forgetting something in my last blog post. I was. I had to plant the garlic. I always do it in the last week of October. So today I finally got out and got those in.

I picked all the biggest cloves from the biggest bulbs to plant. I plant on a six inch offset grid. Though I haven't made up next year's garden plan yet, but did check my records and alliums have never been in this bed before and the bed had corn and squash previously. So it seemed a good bed to use. Hopefully everything else will fit together with a good rotation.

Making Seasonings

Once a year I redo the herbs in my spice draw. I toss out the year old ones and dry some new ones. Often the last ones to get tossed are my onion and garlic powder. I could have dried the garlic powder much earlier, but I didn't seem to get to it until now. And making it was desperate as I ran out of my seasoned salt and needed to make more. I don't dehydrate either onions or garlic in the house as it would be a bit too much to take. I pick a nice day and plug it in outside. Once it is well dehydrated I grind it up in a coffee grinder that I only use for herbs and spices.

Once the garlic and onions were done, I could do a couple mixes that I use all the time. One is seasoned salt and the other is Italian seasonings. Though I do have recipes for them, in general I tend to change them each year to suit my current tastes.

The Italian seasonings is from an Allrecipes recipe. But I don't like as much marjoram as it calls for so I use a third of what they call for. I also add a teaspoon of both onion powder and garlic powder. One year I think I added lavender to the mix. I like making this mix as everything in it come from the garden.

Seasoned salt isn't quite the same as less than half of it comes from the garden (I certainly don't grow salt,sugar, or turmeric), but I find it useful for some things, like making rice when I don't want plain but I don't really want a real seasoned rice. I don't remember where I got my seasoned salt recipe from, but in general I can't have the commercially prepared ones as they tend to have paprika in it (and I can't eat peppers). I was going to add some celery leaves to the mix this year, but forgot to put them in. I might have to go and fix that now. I just wish I had more space in my drawer so I could make more mixes besides the basic ones. I used to make a chicken spice mix that was good. I know I can't have the same one anymore as I'm sure it had paprika. But I could make one similar if I tried. Or I could play around with other people's mixes. Do any of you make your own spice mixes or do you just use the individual spices when you cook?

Rebuilding the Onion Rack and Cleaning the Garlic

Since this is the first year I've tried drying onions outside, it has been a learning experience. I don't really want a permanent drying rack because then I would have to store it. So a while ago I built the above rack. It was very simple. With 8' bamboo poles stretched over the leaf storage area of the compost pile and chicken wire on top. But yesterday I harvested the rest of the onions and these were not done drying. There was not nearly enough space for half the onions, much less all of them. I had to rethink my strategy.

My solution was to use three dimensions instead of two. I could have just laid the onions on top of another onion's greens, but I thought that would set them up for more rot and they would dry slower. It is bad enough that they have to dry outside in the humidity. But three dimensions gave me the room I needed for all of the onions.

Copras in front, then Redwing and Ailsa Craig

Sometimes I think my garden survives on string. I'm always tying things together and holding things up with string. Here I used a 4' bamboo pole at both ends and in the middle. This will keep the 8' poles the correct distance apart to keep the onions from falling through. Some are spaced more closely together for the small onions. And some are farther apart for the larger onions. Everything is tied together with string. When I buy string, I buy a honking big piece of it. The spool was 5000' long when I bought it in 2012. It is still going strong.

I dry my garlic for three weeks in the bike shed. It was time to take it down and clean it up. I did this on the top of the compost pile as that is where I wanted all the waste anyway.

All the good heads go into a mesh bag that is hung in the basement. There were quite a few, maybe a dozen, that had some damage or some black mold on the necks. When there was mold I cut the affected parts off. And the not perfect bulbs were kept out and we will use them first. I've never had any black mold on my garlic before. I have on onions, but never garlic. I wonder what is different this year.

Garlic

Melons happy after the rain

Monday night I heard the wind start to howl and it was getting dark fast. Then I heard thunder in the distance. I was praying that it wouldn't rain on us. Usually I go the other way. As a gardener I love summer thundershowers. But not on Monday night. The reason was my garlic. I had left it in the ground because of the massive rain storm we got over July 4th. I wanted it to dry out a bit before harvesting.

It wasn't supposed to rain. The predictions were for widely isolated thunderstorms. The odds that we would get hit were small. but boy did we get hit. We got about 2/3 of an inch in half an hour. So much for being dry.

When I got up on Tuesday I thought about what to do. When harvesting garlic any guide will tell you not to water before harvest. There isn't much you can do when Mother Natures turns on the spigot. I usually lay my garlic to dry out on my paths for a day, but the paths were wet.

The garlic was ready to come out and it wasn't going to wait. Some of them only had about four living leaves. Those living leaves are the layers on the bulb that will protect your bulbs in storage. And if you wait too long the bulbs start to open out a bit. So I was caught between a rock and a hard place. The garlic had to come out even if the conditions were horrible for it.

These are German Extra Hardy and they are a great storage garlic. I just hope they can store well this year too. I decided to just lay them on the soil in the morning and when the paths dry out in the afternoon I'd move them and flip them over.

For the next two days scattered thundershowers were predicted again. You just can't trust hot, humid weather. It will rain when you don't want it to and hold off when you do need the rain. At least the rest of the plants are happy with the extra water. But the garlic needed the protection of our bike shed. So once they were dry, I banged out dirt from the roots and bundled them up into eight bundles.

Each bundle has a pair so they can be tossed over the rafters. Now we won't have trouble with vampire infestations in the bike shed anymore. Or at least not for the next three weeks that it is drying.

The empty spot in the garden didn't stay empty for long. The next morning I was out early. I broadcast some mustard seed over the bed and raked it in. I'll water it every day until it comes up. I don't grow mustard for the leaves, but for the seed. Like last year I'm growing yellow mustard seed again. Hopefully in the fall I'll have enough to make mustard again. Mustard is often used for another reason too. Those nasty nematodes in the garden hate mustard. It is often used in rotation with other crops to keep it down in the soil. So if I'm smart, I'll plant carrots here next spring. Last year I was going to do it but forgot when making up the rotations. There is just so much to think about when making up rotations for the garden. Sometimes it is hard to remember it all. And this year my carrots have suffered a bit because of it.

Onions and Compost

Yesterday morning I was off to plant my allium bed. The garlic as you can see was planted last year and is up and off to a good start. The onion section of the bed was side dressed and aerated for the onion transplants.

My onion transplants were very nice this year. Some years I find the side leaves dying. but this year they were very strong and healthy.

I wanted to plant all my onions but I could only do the Copras. The Ailsa Craig and Redwing will have to wait for a day or two while the back end of the bed thaws out. Sadly it is still frozen halfway down the bed. The temperature difference is remarkable even in the top few inches of soil.

Then it was on to one of my most reviled chores in the garden. Once things have melted out I have to turn over the compost from the winter. I say compost, but what I really mean is the thawed mass of winter scraps from the kitchen.

We do put leaves on top as we put the scraps in. Well at least if the leaves are unfrozen enough to do so. But the reality is that it isn't really a compost pile over the winter. It is just frozen scraps. And when it thaws in the spring it is smelly and gross. And typically it goes anaerobic from too much moisture. So turning it over is pretty disgusting.

Not only that but the cats had started sitting on top of it watching the ground underneath. And yesterday the dog was barking at it. That could mean only one thing. There was a mouse in the compost pile. Now I put hardware cloth underneath the pile and the holes are too small for most mice on the side. But the mice are pretty good at getting in. The side has long narrow holes along to let air in. Well they had chewed through the plastic between two of the holes and it made it big enough for the mice to easily get in and out. Now I know mice are impossible to really keep out of any compost system. But I try. And with my kitty early warning system, I can clean it out and disrupt them enough to keep the place fairly free of mice. The other piles aren't nearly as attractive to them, as we only put kitchen scraps into the protected black one. I've never had a cat stalking any of the other piles.

So I turned the pile over into my main garden compost. I put a little of the goo from the black composter and lots of nice dry garden refuse and leaves to separate them. That ought to fix my smell. But what an icky job.

At least the overly moist compost at the bottom of the composter was filled with worms. Well really the whole container was filled with worms. Personally I think the worms attract the mice more than the kitchen scraps. I'm happy for all those worms though. I get a lot of worm castings in my compost every year.

Taking Stock

Spring has finally sprung here at Lee's End Eden (what we affectionately call our lot).

Not that the beds look a lot like it is really spring yet. But it was a beautiful sunny day yesterday with a high in the mid 50Fs. So it was nice to walk around the garden seeing where I stand. Well the beds are not unfrozen yet. But some of the beds are defrosted to 9" deep. They aren't good enough to plant and turn over yet, but it will be just a couple of days now with the weather being warmer. Maybe I can turn over the soil on Friday and get my peas and favas in? I can always hope.

I also checked out my overwintered plants. The kale is looking pretty sad. I'll have to get in there and get rid of the dying leaves. But it has started to perk up already. I won't eat any of those old disgusting leaves. But the new leaves will be good. There isn't a lot of time for them to grow in the spring before they bolt and this year they will have even less time this year with things thawing out late. But hopefully I'll get a good crop.

I've never had the spinach look quite this bad before. But again as it grows it will perk up and I'll only eat the new leaves. At least it has mostly survived the winter.

I have a tiny patch of self sown mache. There really isn't enough for anything like a salad. But once the lettuce starts it will add to my greens. In a really small way.

The garlic has started peeking out from under the soil. It won't be long until they are really growing fast.

One of the plants I worry about every winter is the rosemary. Rosemary is hardy to zone 8 usually. I live in zone 6. So I planted two "hardy" rosemarys when I first came in. The Hill Hardy died the second winter. But the Arp still lives. A year and a half ago I layered the plant by sticking some branches under the soil. Last spring I cut those branches off and planted them around the garden. I now have three Arps. I figure if one dies maybe one in a different spot will live. The plant above is the original plant. I have another that looks much sadder by my rhubarbs. And yet another that looks pretty good by the foundation. The rosemary above always has the same side dead. That is the side that is always into the winter winds. I ought to cover it with some burlap to protect it over the winter. I'm guessing if I did, I wouldn't have much die off.

The cilantro that was sown between the kale died. Which isn't too surprising. It only lived one year and that year was the year without winter. But by the foundation a few cilantro plants have survived. Hopefully more will come up as I love my cilantro.

After last winter all my sage but one had died. So last year I planted three more plants. I never seem to have enough sage. I'm almost out of what I dried from last year. This year all four plants seem to be alive. I'm very happy about that. I need more sage. I'm surprised at how poorly it grows in this garden. At my last house the sage wanted to be a 2'-3' bush. Here I'm lucky when it hits a foot. But since they all lived, maybe they will grow bigger this year.

I also checked on my rhubarb. One of my neighbors wants some rhubarb in their garden. So I'm going to dig one up and split it. I've noticed that it is already coming out of dormancy, but the ground there is still frozen. It is almost thawed though. So I'll keep checking. When it is diggable I'll get that done.