This weekend, we did our annual fall planting of garlic. We grow a hard neck variety that does very well in our climate zone and stays fresh in storage for well over a year.
Garlic gets planted in the fall, sits tight over the winter, and is one of the first plants in the garden to say hello to spring.
We planted 13 full heads of garlic, about 120 cloves, which will produce more than we can consume for the year as each clove produces a new head when harvested next summer.
We harvested all of our hard neck garlic last week. This whole growing season, we only had one garlic plant that actually grew a scape, can you believe that?
I’m not sure if that had to do with the high heat or drought, but regardless, that was the case.
We have our garlic heads drying out on the porch to prepare them for storage.
They are slightly bigger than last year, a sign that picking the largest cloves to plant surely works.
We’re excited for the major tomato harvests in our very near future so we can begin making some delicious homemade sauce.
The forecast over the next week shows that it will not dip below 41 degrees in Western Mass, so I decided to bring out the more vulnerable perennials that had been hibernating under our barn in pots. Among them are a few varieties of hops that we started last year from rhizomes. They are already beginning to grow shoots, which is very exciting to see.
The hops most likely could have been planted in the ground last year, but I wanted to nurture them a little extra to make sure they were strong for their second year. Soon, I will put them directly into the ground under a 16′ trellis that I have yet to build. After planting them, I will trim the shoots down to 3 so the roots can concentrate on growing each shoot to it’s full potential. Surprisingly, I read that you can cook and eat the tender hops shoots that you remove. Or better yet, try pickling hops. I look forward to trying either of these out.
And in the garden…
We call these ‘volunteers’, a whole head of garlic that we apparently missed last year. We’ll be able to dig this up and separate each growing clove into its own plant.
