November 17, 2013
The first step of planting garlic is breaking the bulbs and sorting your large seed garlic from your small food garlic. Every night when we got home from work Ross and I would turn on the TV and break apart the bulbs of our nine varieties. We ended up getting two varieties of soft neck garlic (the kind you can make garlic braids out of) and then seven varieties of hardneck garlic (known for being more flavorful but with the hard neck that cannot be braided). Sorting garlic is a messy job and so our living room was a garlic disaster zone for the week. But it sure did smell yummy!
After all the garlic was broken into cloves and then sorted we weighed all the garlic so that we can see how much yield we get at the end of the season and compare it to how much we started with. After the garlic was weighed we took to the fields! Because garlic likes to be at least 6" apart Ross crafted a handy planting tool that poked evenly spaced holes into the rows which made seeding a whole lot easier. Because garlic cloves have to planted with the pointy side up and the root side down, each plant has to be planted individually. There isn't really a machine that automates the process so you send a lot of time on your hands and knees (hence Ross' knee pads)!July 30, 2024
July 11, 2024