Garlic Planted and Mulched, Check

A significant task was successfully started and finished last week while we enjoyed some of the nicest dry and warm autumn weather we could ask for. I have so many (bad) memories of planting and mulching the next season's garlic in either too wet conditions or with a hard deadline due to impending bad weather that I could not resist embarking on the project this past week, almost two weeks ahead of what's become our normal planting date.

Beginning on Monday and wrapping up on Wednesday, it was good to know that we had most of the week to finish the job. We even managed to plant and mulch the whole patch 'in-house', i.e. without the help of CSA members during workshifts. It's not every season that we have three full-time farmer helpers onsite this time of year and we were able to make pretty quick work of planting the almost 400lbs of garlic clove/seed spread out over 3000 feet of beds. CSA members did provide great help in splitting up the garlic bulbs into 400lbs of cloves as well as the harvesting, tying, and hanging of many thousands of bulbs back in July. So a team effort, indeed.

And that, my friends, was the very last planting of this season, this year. After using 12.5 large round bales to cover the entire area with straw, the garlic cloves will slowly wake up and send roots downward and a sun-seeking sprout upwards. Depending on future temperatures this autumn and winter, we may not see above ground growth until late February or early March. Then, it's quick growth until we eat the first iteration of this amazing plant in early May, known as 'green garlic', when the entire plant is edible.

Now that we've planted the garlic, we plan to resume distributing unused bulbs during the final two weeks of Main Season. Enjoy!

Garlic Planting Process. Step 1: run the transplanter wheels down the beds to achieve uniform spacing (3 rows, 12 inches apart, 6 inches in row) and indent soil for standard depth control. Step 2: drop the cloves into the holes. Step 3: push the cloves root side down into the soil and then cover. Step 4: spread straw mulch 2-4 inches thick over entire area.