in the dirt, urban plot

Garlic – Fall 2011 Planting

Posted on by annabel
30
Oct

Planting garlic seems to have become our Halloween weekend ritual. And, what a lovely day it was for being outside at the farm. Although garlic offered a nice complement to our market (scapes in June and garlic throughout the latter half of the season), we have scaled back our production a bit this year. Partly because our record keeping was terrible and we just have no idea what most of the garlic even is and we didn’t order any seed garlic this year at all. We are planting a variety of mystery garlic and Music (we are confident on that variety at least). Today I planted one raised bed, which is about 200 cloves of garlic. This includes 1.75 lbs of Music and 1.5 lbs of the mystery garlic. Here are some pictures of the steps involved.

We planted 1 - 12' x 4' x 8" raised bed.

The raised bed has a combination of topsoil, compost and sand. I turned it over with a broadfork and mixed in additional compost before planting. Although it has been extremely wet, I was pleasantly surprised by all the worms in the bed….definitely a good sign!

We covered the bed with ag fabric with holes spaced for each clove.

This is the same template we have been using for the past 2 years. Here’s how we made it.

Close up of the cloves before they are pushed down into the soil.

Each garlic clove will turn into a bulb of garlic. We stored our largest bulbs for seed and then broke apart the cloves the night before planting.

We mulched it with a bale of straw.

0 thoughts on “Garlic – Fall 2011 Planting”

  1. diane says:

    I would buy all your garlic if I lived there. I used up all mine already but a CSA friend brought me 4 more bulbs that should get me through November then it’s back to grocery store garlic—ugh.

    • Annabel says:

      Thanks, Diane. I’ll have Eric bring you some of ours at Thanksgiving. I hate having to buy it at the grocery store too, but we have quite a bit stored for use through winter!