Harvest Monday 22 August 2016

 

The drought continues despite our getting about an inch of rain last week. I am getting a few small harvests here and there. It is no big deal for me but some of the small farmers around here are going to be hurt. A freak -15F freeze in the middle of 70F weather in February wiped out the peach crop in New England. And some of the orchards are having to irrigate their apple trees for the first time in recent history. Surprisingly the corn is pretty good. Ears are much longer than usual and they are very sweet. But a neighbor up the street who grows a field of corn to sell has corn stalks at knee level in mid-August because he can not irrigate.



The patty pan squash is a Sunburst which is supposed to have a central green spot in the center around the blossom end, but the green has bled out of the center.



I harvested the last two Golden Acre cabbages because their quality was not improving, cooking away in the sun. In addition, the cabbage caterpillars seem to have made their appearance and were chewing on one of them.





The Swiss chard has rebounded with the rain and slightly cooler weather. The coloring on Pink Passion is more attractive than earlier. Some of the leaves do have cercospora spots on them.



I am harvesting tomatoes as soon as they color a little to avoid loss to the birds and chipmunks. I have talked to other gardeners who are having the same problem. The big tomato above is my one and only Mortgage Lifter, an impulse purchase. That plant is not going to pay my mortgage, but so far it is my largest tomato.



More tomatoes. The birds have really attacked my Black Beauty tomatoes so I am removing most of them. One I picked earlier is now showing some red on its green areas. The black color comes from exposure to sunlight so the undersides are green. Apparently the green will turn to red as they ripen. And to top off a smashing year, late blight has arrived and is affecting most of the tomato plants.





The Pink Berkeley Tie Dye I picked green is now almost ripe after sitting on the kitchen counter.  The colors are very attractive, random green stripes on a pink background.



The peppers are happy enough that they are starting to flower. This is Lemon Drop.



Likewise for the Ancho Poblano peppers. They are now almost a meter tall and starting to flower.



Sunday I started some dill pickles fermenting. I had to buy the pickling cukes from a farm stand since my cucumber vines are mostly dead. The garlic and dill seed are from my garden, however. And the grape leaves covering them and in the bottom came from wild grapes in the back yard.



I am also trying a lacto-fermentation of garlic cloves, hoping I can preserve some more of my garlic harvest. This is a quart jar slightly more than half full. It was a tedious job to peel all that garlic, even using a silicone rubber tube designed to peel garlic. The brine is just a basic brine: 2 cups (450 ml) of unchlorinated water and 1 1/2 Tbsp (26 .) of sea salt. The brine looks cloudy in the photo because I added a teaspoon of whey to get the fermentation started. Garlic does not produce a raucous ferment and will need to ferment for about a month.

That is what happened in my garden last week. To see what gardeners around the world are harvesting, visit Dave at Our Happy Acres, our host for Harvest Monday.

PS I was planning to post this early Monday morning but we had a freak storm go through the area at 3 AM. They are not sure if tornadoes or microbursts were involved, but whatever, it took put a tree down in my driveway and across the power lines. So no power until  9 AM. And we did get a lot of rain in a very short time, which will definitely help.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Garlic Harvest 2016

I had the feeling that 2016 for me was a good garlic year. Now that the garlic is cured and cleaned up, I can weigh it and see what actually happened. And the tally seems to indicate it was indeed a good year for most of my garlic. I planted the same amount, five varieties getting 4 squares each, planted 4 per square foot for a total of about 80 bulbs (8 pounds). The Chesnok Red actually got only 3 squares, planted 5 per square because of its small size.

What did differ was Spanish Roja, which had been a great garlic for me, was not planted this year when I could not find the seed garlic I thought I had reserved. So it was replaced by Philips, a garlic named after a town in Maine where it was grown, but with Italian heritage via upstate New York. I found it at the MDI Garlic Festival. Spanish Roja had a bad crop the year before and I was going to give it another year.  I may grow Spanish Roja again someday with new purchased seed stock.

If you want to read about my 2015 harvest, those comments are in this post. To read comments made when I planted this crop in 2015, go here. And here are the 2016 harvest results.



The total harvest this year was 8.2 pounds (3.7kg.) versus last year at 7.8 pounds (3.5kg.). Not that much bigger in pounds but the garlic this year is far healthier and dried very well compared to last year's crop. Some of that is due to weather, but I also learned a few tricks from trying to dry and process the 2015 crop in very humid conditions. I harvested when the ground was bone dry and pulled some a little early when it looked  like rain (it didn't). That meant the bulbs were dry to start and didn't retain a lot of soil. Drying started in the garage but when the humidity soared, I moved them into the basement with a dehumidifier. They dried nicely this year and cleanup was easy.



Apparently I was not going to plant Chesnok Red this year because of its increasingly small size, replaced by the Philips garlic, but then at planting time I could not find the seed garlic for Spanish Roja. Well, I am happy I did plant this because it did very well this year. Average bulb weight this year was 1.5 ounces, up from 2015's 1 ounce. Total harvest from 3 squares weighed 23 ounces compared to 15 ounces last year. This garlic variety has small bulbs to begin with, but the smaller size also translates into improved storage life. Just last week I retrieved a couple of bulbs from the bin in the basement and most of the cloves were still usable one year after harvest. Pretty good for a hard neck. This is a Purple Stripe garlic and this year is really beautiful with its purple wrapper.




This is the second year for the purple stripe garlic, Duganski, in my garden. When I first planted it in 2014 I was upset with the seed garlic from Territorial because it was obviously harvested late and the bulbs had opened up and skins were peeling off the individual cloves. The harvest in 2015 turned out OK despite that and this year is improved. I harvested 28 ounces compared to 26 in 2015, and average size improved from 1.6 ounces to 1.7.



I purchased German Red, a Rocambole garlic, at the MDI Garlic Festival in 2014 so this is the second year for it in the garden. It is a big garlic, with about four huge cloves per bulb. Last year my largest bulb was a whopper at 4 ounces, while this year's largest was only 3 ounces. But total weight increased from 35 ounces to 37 ounces, while average size decreased from 2.8 ounces to 2.3 ounces. This one does not keep well so it has to be used quickly.



German Extra Hardy, a porcelain type, was one of my first garlics and a reliable producer. Last year was a bad year, however, and it produced a small harvest. I planted it anyway last fall, but discovered on planting day that a lot of the seed stock I had set aside was bad. As a result, I dipped into some bulbs I held in reserve but only had 13 cloves to plant. Well, it really must have been a good year for garlic because this variety did very well in 2016, producing 21 ounces from 13 bulbs versus last year's 20 ounces from 17 bulbs. That is an average 1.6 ounce bulb size compared to 1.2 ounces last year.



Philips is new in the garden this year, another Rocambole garlic that I purchased from Salty Dog Farm at the MDI Garlic Festival. This is a Maine heirloom garlic that is a little hard to find. It has a reputation of being a relatively good keeper for a Rocambole, which made it attractive. It did pretty well but there was a big variation in bulb size. I am not sure why that happened, maybe some of the planted cloves were small? At any rate, next years seed stock gets selected from the largest bulbs so hopefully it will adapt to the conditions in my garden.

The garlic harvest does seem to indicate this was a good year for garlic after last year's poor results. All of the varieties I had concern about did very well this year, so it had to be the conditions last year. The MDI Garlic Festival is definitely in the plans for this year, made even better by the co-location of a KC-sanctioned BBQ contest. I may also try to get to the Vermont Garlic Festival the weekend before. So now the garlic has been cleaned, weighed and reported and I can now begin to enjoy it and preserve some of it. There is nothing like fresh garlic.

Harvest Monday 11 July 2016

The weather last week remained dry. While hot on Monday it cooled off for the rest of the week and some mornings were quite chilly. This was caused by some cold front that was supposed to bring rain, but while we got lots of clouds and even some lightning, the result was a few tenths of an inch. All this is going to do is wet the foliage and raise humidity, raising the potential for disease higher, while doing little for the roots.





















I'm still getting a few Atlantis shoots. I am wondering how much of this stuff do I have to plant to get a reasonable harvest. I keep it in the refrigerator until I get enough for two servings. The rest of this harvest went into a batch of salsa made with canned tomatoes, since it will be awhile until those first tomatoes arrive (and they will not be going into salsa).



















Above are two of the heads of Blue Wind broccoli. They were starting to open up so I harvested them. I also clipped off the growing tip off a Spigariello liscia that was headed straight up rather than branching. It has a mild flavor but the leaves are a bit tough, like a kale, or like a broccoli leaf.



The big harvest last week was the garlic. I grow hardneck garlic and follow the rule of digging them when 40-50% of the leaves turn brown or yellow. The remaining green leaves dry and form the wrapper that protects the cloves, so you can't wait until all leaves are brown. Another consideration was the weather. We were looking at potentially several days of rain, so I chose to dig them last week while everything was dry. First out was the German Red, second to produce scapes and second to be harvested.



The next day I dug the rest: Chesnok Red, Philips, and Duganski. It is looking like a good year for garlic. Even the Chesnok Red produced large heads this year. The next step is to cure the garlic without mold forming. Last year teh ground was wet and it was very humid, so drying in the garage did not work well. This year the garlic is in the shed and when the volatiles subside a little (right now it is almost eye watering in the shed), I may move them into the basement where we run a dehumidifier.



Finally, given how dry it has been, I decided to try sprouting some Jade bush beans in a paper towel rather than reseeding. It took 3-4 days for sprouts to start emerging. On a couple of these, the root is actually too long and I had to handle them carefully to avoid breaking off the brittle root. Out of 50+ seeds in the paper towel, I found about a dozen that were sprouted or near to sprouting. These were packed for 2013, so I guess I will be buying new seed next year. It is a little disappointing finding that bean seeds aren't viable for longer than a few years, although Jade has always had slow and poor germination compared to Provider.

That's what happened in my garden last week. To see what other gardeners around are doing, visit Dave @ Our Happy Acres, our host for Harvest Monday.

Spring Tiptoes In

I took a photograph of my Meyer lemon tree in January and noted it lacked blossoms, which it produces in abundance each spring. Well, the tree now has blossoms, so it must finally be spring. The sun is definitely stronger but it is still chilly and windy outside. On Sunday I stopped at the garden while doing a shopping excursion. It may be spring but the garden looks like tundra.



The only green is from the weeds that overwintered. The soil is still a bit boggy and not really ready to work. And there is more rain in the forecast, so no need to rush things.



There is a bit of green showing in my own garden plot. The garlic looks healthy and just needs a shot of nitrogen to get it really going.


Inside it is warm and the seedlings are doing well under the grow lights. The lettuces, broccoli and cabbages are sown and have germinated. While small now, they are weeks away from weather where it would be safe to plant them outside, so  these are on schedule. A couple of years ago I was wooed by an unseasonably mild spring and transplanted early, only to be set back severely by a single hard freeze.



The peppers this year are doing very well. The technique of pre-sprouting with a wet paper towel inside a plastic bag worked really well and all peppers have germinated adequately, and most of the sprouted seeds have emerged from the flats in which they were transplanted.



The tomatoes, however, are a mixed bag and I am not real happy. Usually I have much better luck with tomatoes. I tried the same pre-sprouting technique used for the peppers with the tomatoes. I was really surprised with how long some varieties took to sprout. Currently I am still waiting for Sunkist, Black Beauty, and Jaune Flamme to sprout after two weeks.. I sprinkled a few more seeds on the paper towels in case the original seeds are DOA. These are three varieties I can not buy locally so if they do not sprout soon I will not be growing them this year.

Garlic Planting 2015

I finally got the garlic planted on November 6 this year. Given the mild weather, this is certainly not late and maybe a little early. I want the cloves to develop a root system before the ground freezes but I do not want to see any significant foliage growth, to avoid freeze damage during the winter. The beds were prepared with generous amounts of compost, as well as Garden Tone, bone meal, crab meal, kelp meal, and rock dust. I use a chopped straw for a mulch which has worked adequately in the past. Five types of hardneck garlic were planted.

The garlic went in my raised beds with a 6 inch depth, which is plenty for growing garlic. For most of the varieties I used a four per square (foot) spacing, which means they are spaced 6 inches (15 cm.) apart each direction. The Chesnok Red has become a much smaller garlic so I used 5 per square for that garlic. For the five varieties, I planted a total of 19 squares which yields over 89 bulbs. That is more than I can consume/preserve before they go bad, so I try to give some away, particularly to gardeners who may want to try growing garlic. We’re visiting my daughter in two weeks and a bag of garlic is going to be one of the gifts I bring. I hope she is thrilled. Maybe we will make Freddy’s Roast Potatoes.

German Red is a large Rocambole garlic that averages 4-5 cloves per head and is very cold tolerant. I purchased my seed stock last September at the MDI Garlic Festival. It was grown by Goosefoote Farm in Vermont. The harvest this year was very good, with very large heads. Largest was 4 oz. with 4 cloves or an ounce (28 g.) per clove. Goosefoote was at the fair again this year and at least from an eye test, their garlic was much smaller than the year before. Just part of the variability in growing garlic.

German Extra Hardy is another large (3-4 large cloves per head), cold tolerant garlic. It is considered a Porcelain with a white skin but with purplish cloves. Being a Porcelain it is supposed to store well for a hardneck, but I have had the opposite experience. The cloves soften and turn brown on me long before the other varieties. I set aside my seed stock in August when I cleaned up the dried plants. By planting time this year, some of the cloves had already shriveled. I learned my lesson last year and brought along a couple spare bulbs, which I needed to get enough healthy cloves to plant my four squares. I am thinking I probably should purchase some new seed stock to replace my own.

I wanted to try a new garlic this year and decided to look for Phillips at the MDI Garlic Festival. I found some very nice bulbs grown by Salty Dog Farm in Milbridge, Maine. Phillips is named after Phillips, Maine where it was grown around the area and is hard to find outside of  Maine.  It is a Rocambole garlic that was collected by the Scatterseed Project from the farm of Raymond Rowe. His seed stock originally came from a family in Rome, New York, whose ancestors brought it from Italy when they immigrated to work on the Erie Canal. So it has a nice Northeast/Italian history. The heads were good size with 6-7 tan-skinned cloves per head.  Despite being a Rocambole, it is supposed to keep fairly long for a hardneck, which is certainly admirable if true.

Duganski (originally from Kazakhstan) was new last year, from seed stock purchased from Territorial. It did very well for me this year and produced some beautiful bulbs. It is considered a Purple Stripe and you can see the beautiful purple cloves inside the white skin of the head. My heads and the seed stock I bought last year has a white outer wrapper, not the purple striped skins shown in catalogs. The cloves are long and slender and taper to a very sharp tip, which makes it harder for dunces like me to plant the basal end up. And it is supposed to last a long time in storage, which is a plus. We will see.

OK, I was going to replace the Chesnok Red with the Phillips seed stock I bought, but a funny thing happened on the way to the garden. I can not find the Spanish Roja garlic. No idea where I put it. This year I left it in the garden too long and did a poor job of drying it, so maybe I tossed it all in the compost in a fit of disgust. So Chesnok Red gets a reprieve, which is alright since it is a great garlic. Since the cloves are so small, these were planted 5 per square, but only 3 squares were planted. Chesnok Red is another Purple Stripe from the Republic of Georgia and you can see the beautiful color. It is also supposed to be one of the best cooking garlics and also stores well.

The reason I was going to pass over planting Chesnok Red this year was the fact that the heads seem to be getting smaller each year, rather than larger. The theory is that you select the largest and finest heads each year for your seed garlic. You are practicing selection and eventually your garlic is optimally adapted to your soil and climate and will produce humongous, astounding results. It has not quite worked out that way. The Chesnok Red is smaller, the German Extra Hardy does not keep well, the Spanish Roja is not as large. Apparently I am not alone.

While searching for descriptions of my garlic among web sites of various seed garlic growers, I encountered, one after another, descriptions by small growers describing puzzling changes in the character of their garlic. The big suppliers will have their usual boilerplate descriptions, but many of the smaller growers like to describe what happened on the farm this year and supply a personalized description of their garlic. Many are reporting that their garlic stock is changing. Color, size, clove count, whatever. It struck me because I have never seen that pointed out by growers but have noticed it in my own garlic.

So the garlic is safely in the ground. Just a little more clean up and then I can concentrate on the seed catalogs that are starting to arrive! We’re on to 2016.

Allium Harvest 2015

It was a mixed year in my garden for onions and garlic. One thing new this year was I ordered some of the onion plants from Dixondale Farms, rather than starting them myself from seed. Good thing, given my success starting the shallots from seed last spring. The lack of successful plants led to the small shallot count this year. The other factor was the weather. It was a hot (but not damn hot) and very dry summer. We have gone for 6 week stretches with hardly measurable rain. This is New England, not southern California or the high dessert. But the humidity was sky high, which caused problems with fungus in  the garden and when it came time to dry the harvest. Given the conditions I had a good harvest and am mostly satisfied with the results.

 

Storage Onions

 

	Total Wt.	No. Bulbs	Avg. Wt.	Largest
Ambition Shallots	37 oz.	20	1.85 oz.	3.2 oz.
Copra	200 oz.	57	3.7 oz.	6 oz.
Red Zeppelin	76 oz.	32	3.125 oz.	4.7 oz.

 

 

 

This year I grew Ambition seed shallots because my favorite, Saffron, has apparently been discontinued. In looking for an alternative, I chose Ambition because I did not want a huge shallot, but one with long storage potential. I still have a few small Saffron shallots I found cleaning out the storage bin and they are still hard. Ambition did OK. The plants were slow in getting established and growing but towards the end of the growing season they put on a lot of foliage and sized up nicely. Too bad I only got twenty but I will enjoy them this winter.

 

Last year the Saffron shallots produced 37 bulbs weighing 45 ounces, averaging 1.2 ounces per bulb with largest being 2.5 ounces.

 

 

The Copra onions grown from Dixondale starts were quite successful, over 12 pounds from 10 square feet. The plants were healthy (almost no thrip or fungus damage) and most bulbs are perfect. I am very happy with them. Last year I grew Patterson from seed and harvested a little over 4 pounds from 6 squares, so big improvement this year.

 

 

The Red Zeppelin onions were less successful. The bundle of plants from Dixondale contained half very large plants and the rest tiny, spindly plants. That was OK because I allocated less space to the red onions (I use fewer). Unfortunately, a lot of the large starts failed to break dormancy and just rotted, reducing the yield. These onions later were somewhat afflicted by onion thrips and I failed to spray. At least no purple blotch appeared this year. Last year I grew Red Wing and 5 squares yielded only 20 onions weighing 58 ounces.

 

 

Unfortunately, a lot of the Zeps looked like this. I had some of this last year with the Red Wing onions, but not nearly as bad so I did not worry about it.

 

 

You can see some lesions and the outer layers of the onion have split. I have no idea what causes this.  I find nothing similar in any of the onion pest and disease guides. Any ideas?

 

Other Onions

 The trouble with ordering from Dixondale is the more you buy, the cheaper (per bundle) it gets. So I wound up with 4 bundles of onions containing 6 different varieties of onions.

 

 

The past couple of years I have started some Rossa Lunga di Tropea onions from seed. I usually tuck them here and there in odd corners and just pull them when I want a fresh onion. I was surprised that Dixondale offered them, so I added a bundle to the order. Of course I wound up with far more plants than I usually use, so I allocated 6 square feet to them and wound up with this nice pile. They are not great keepers, so this pile is where I am going right now for onions.

 

 

The other bundle I purchased was a mixed bundle of three different intermediate day onions: Candy, Red Candy, and Super Star. I pulled a number of them as they formed bulbs, so this pile does not represent the total harvest. The Red Candy were the best performers, forming nice attractive bulbs with no disease issues. The bundle contained few of the yellow-skinned Candy onions and they did not grow well at all. The third onion was Super Star (actually half of them were leek plants) and they seemed to do well. Unfortunately, they did not dry well and I tossed most of them because they had stem rot. The two white onions above are the only survivors from the harvest. I did not bother to weigh these onions. The only onion I would consider growing again is the Red Candy.

 

Garlic

 

	Total Wt.	No. Bulbs	Avg. Wt.	Largest Bulb
Duganski	26 ox.	16	1.6 oz.	2 oz.
Chesnok Red	15 oz.	15	1 oz.	1.3 oz.
Spanish Roja	29 oz.	21	1.4 oz.	2.6 oz.
German X Hardy	20 oz.	17	1.2 oz.	1.8 oz.
German Red	35 oz.	16	2.8 oz.	4 oz.

 

 

German Extra Hardy is one of the first garlics I grew and is a reliable producer every year, although yield seems to be dropping. The first year I got 32 ounces from 4 squares, last year was 18 ounces, and this year I got 20 ounces. I selected some nice sized heads for seed garlic so hopefully next year is better.

 

This photo shows a trick I picked up from someone. While weighing the garlic I select the heads I am going to save for seed garlic for the fall. Those heads are labeled with a fine Sharpie to identify them and make sure they don’t get selected for dinner.

 

 

This is an example of what not to do with your garlic. The Spanish Roja, normally one of my best garlics, was in a separate bed from the rest and was not quite ready when I dug the other bed. Unfortunately, I forgot about them and harvested them too late. The result was a lot of the bulbs were opening up. In addition, they dried very poorly and as you can see, have a lot of mold I could not get off. I am going to break out a recipe like Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic to use these up since they will not keep. In fact. some of the heads are already bad and had to be tossed.

 

Last year I harvested 33 bulbs from 6 squares weighing 48 ounces, largest one was 2 ounces. This year I got 21 bulbs weighing 29 ounces, with largest bulb at 2.6 ounces. Last year some of the bulbs also did not clean up well and looked a lot like the picture above, so it has a bit to do with the variety.

 

 

I like Chesnok Red but it is not performing well in my garden.. This year I got 15 bulbs weighing a grand total of 15 ounces from 4 squares planted 4 per square. Last year I harvested 27 ounces from 4 squares planted  4 per square, which was also down from the year before. I am thinking of replacing this garlic with a different variety next year. However, reading descriptions on some garlic farm websites, it seems Chesnok Red typically produces smaller heads, and they point out the smaller garlics keep better than the larger. Not sure what I will do.

 

 

Duganski is new this year, with seed garlic purchased from Territorial. I was not happy with the bulbs I got from Territorial because they were harvested late, just like my Spanish Roja above, and were coming apart. The cloves germinated just fine and I got a nice harvest, with bulbs being dug at the appropriate time. This was my second largest garlic, coming in behind German Red.

 

 

The German Red garlic did really well. It had the tallest foliage with the thickest stems, which promised big bulbs. That is exactly what it produced, very large bulbs with 4, sometimes 5 cloves. The largest bulb weighed 4 ounces (1 ounce per clove) and the average weight was 2.4 ounces. This garlic was new to me this year. I purchased bulbs at the MDI Garlic Festival last September from Goosefoote Farm of Vermont. They had the same garlic this year and it seemed (eyeball test only) their heads were smaller than last year and smaller than my harvest this year.

 

I visited the Mount Desert Island Garlic Festival again this year and intended to look for a garlic to replace Chesnok Red. There are so many great varieties, so it is a tough decision. I decided to look for some Phillips (also spelled Philips) garlic and purchased some nice heads from Salty Dog Farm of Milbridge, Maine. Phillips is a Rocambole hard neck variety acquired from a farm in Phillips, Maine by the Scatterseed Project. The farm owner, Raymond Rowe, got his original seed stock from a man in Rome, New York whose parents brought it from Italy when they immigrated to work on the Erie Canal. Besides the local origins and nifty history, this garlic is also supposed to be hardy and a relatively long keeper among Rocamboles. We will see.

 

While looking for Maine-based sources of the Phillips garlic, I ran across the useful web site of True North Farms in Montville, Maine. They are a large organic garlic grower and can sell seed garlic in large quantities to other garlic growers. Their web site has a lot of useful information for both commercial growers and home gardeners. On the Background tab of their site they show their cultivation practices, which involves a 3-year crop rotation with an elaborate sequence of ground cover crops. The Planting tab has detailed instructions for home gardens (including raised beds) and their recommended process for commercial growers.

 

Their commercial process was interesting and I learned a few things. Besides their extensive sequence of cover crops, they use certain amendments when planting and during the growing season. These include fish emulsion, humic acid and some of the Quantum Growth products. These are initially applied as a drench and then are sprayed on bi-weekly. The Quantum Growth products supply microorganisms (Rhodopsuedomonas palustris) that are capable of photosyntheis as well as other bacteria (Bacillus amyloliquefacien, Bacillus subtilis, Bacillus licheniformis, and Bacillus megaterium) that protect the plants from disease. In addition, they spray bi-weekly with Procidic, an organic bactericide and fungicide, something I need to start doing. At harvest, they spray an OMRI-approved sodium bicarbonate solution the day before they harvest to tamp down any mildew spores. Overall, an interesting process that might have some application to home gardens.