Growing Garlic

Alt title: Keeping my friends at arms length.

I know quite a few people who grow garlic in their gardens in mass, and every time I’m weighing my own garlic in the produce section, I remind myself that this is something we could be harvesting ourselves with, like, zero effort.

My friend Kelly has green thumb (I saw her garden in person last year, and it continues to inspire). She’s done the heavy lifting at demystifying everything garlic – from varieties, to where to buy, to how to grow. I went back to her post on the topic recently as a reminder to get it done now. We were given a bunch of locally grown garlic heads this fall, and they hadn’t been treated with a sprout inhibitor, so I took that as a sign and carved out a space for 9 cloves in our garden. Our soil is very sandy and light and well-draining, and word on the web is that it makes for perfect garlic growing conditions. Hopefully these 9 cloves will produce, and next year I can plant twice as many, and twice as many after that until someday no one will want to come near us because we’ll be emitting garlic scent in a quarter mile radius.

I’m also documenting this here so that come spring, I have a slightly improved chance at remembering that I actually did plant garlic during a short lunch break this afternoon, and that I should resist pulling up those little shoots when I’m weeding.

And, hey Pete, that’s why the corner of our garden looks like a burial site. Disregard.

Our garden this year was so-so. Not as great as last year, because we lost 30% of our bell peppers and 75% of our tomato plants early in the season for unknown reasons. The best trellis ever (verified) was an overachiever, and gave us armload upon armload of green beans which we converted into jars of dilly beans. Raspberries and blueberries that had been transplanted the previous year are becoming more established; hopefully we’ll begin seeing fruit from those plants next season.

We regretfully didn’t plant squash this year, but already have a list for next year that includes butternut and acorn varieties, along with sugar snap peas, and hot peppers. We’re also going to try using our large fenced in garden for some flowers too – I swiped some giant sunflower seeds and zinnia heads from my mom’s garden when we were apple picking. One of these days, I’ll sketch out a plan for sorting next year’s bed, but in the meantime I’ll leave you with this snapshot of the gardens at the Strong Museum in Rochester – totally loving the checkerboard way of spacing pavers to sort the bed while keeping weeds at bay!