Planting Garlic

It seems as though my posts are about a week behind, but my moto has always been better late than never! Last weekend was garlic planting weekend and even though it was a lot of work, we had a lot of fun working alongside family and planting our first ever crop!

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)! Ross dad and sister Ruby and my mom, sister Kate and Aunt Debbie all came out to help us with the planting. We would like to give them a huge thank you because we would not have gotten the entire field planted in one day if they didn't volunteer to help us! They all worked their buns off in the cold until the sun set when the last seed was planted. At the end of the day we planted about 3,125 cloves of garlic. We are hoping that each one of those cloves will turn into a bulb over the winter months. Cross your fingers!

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