The garden has exploded. Just gone boom. I've got tomato and squash plants that are taller than I am. We're already getting ripe stupus and all the other tomatoes are covered in green little balls of potential delicious. There are collard greens trees that are pushing four feet tall and show no signs of stopping. There are bushels of chard and kale (which I keep telling Erin I'll give her) just waiting around to be steamed with a little balsamic vinegar and soy sauce and thrown over couscous. The staggering amount of biomass is shocking.
The epic garlic harvest is all out of the ground and drying today, so my dinning room table is unavailable for things like dinning. We have Polish Soft Neck, Fireball, and Bavarian Purple, the later of which came out a little disappointing. It's weighing in light and the flavor isn't, in my opinion, as distinctive as the other two. It's still good, and the other two are outstanding, so I'm not worried.
Josh and I (who are we kidding, just Josh) came up with our strategy for planting garlic next year and it goes a little something like this.
- Plant the biggest cloves. This seems simple and I don't know why it never occurred to us before. Garlic cloves are not seeds in the traditional sense, they're actual plants which is why they sprout if you don't keep them dry. So when planting, you want to select the biggest cloves to get the biggest plants. Flavor is more important than size, a perspective generally overlooked in grocery stores, but it's still nice to get the most bang for your buck.
- Cold treat the cloves. Garlic grows well in very cold climates and generally needs a cold snap to sprout. Oakland is not generally the best provider in this regard, so instead of praying for a freak two days of cold after you plant, you just throw the cloves you're going to plant in the freezer overnight before planting. Theoretically, this makes for faster sprouting and thus more growing. There is apparently a risk of over freezing them, which I'll need to do more research into.
- Try more varieties. Uh, yeah. We want to try more varieties of garlic. So we're going to plant them. Hopefully we'll find something that really likes our climate and soil. No idea what varieties yet, but we don't need to figure that out for another four months.
- Soil testing. Both Josh and I noticed that the garlic planted near our rosemary bush was smaller than the stuff further away. Could have been that they were competing with it for water, or maybe the soil is just weak in that bed. In the next round of planting, we're going to put garlic in all our beds and monitor the difference in sizes. Hopefully, we can find information about good companion plants so we don't need to do this trial and error style.
I'm going to do some reading today about when to clip the stalks on garlic and when I do clip our crop I'll post weights, total and average. We like scientific rigor in this compound and so our garlic must be measured.
The other project that is dwelling in the front of my brain right now is developing our beds. Our old compost bed is home to the squash right now, so the plan is to drop all the tomato and squash plants in that bed at the end of the season and build a box around it. At that point, it should be about read to go as a full fledged growing bed. Our other compost bed probably needs about six months of green inputs before it's ready for prime time, but I'm still excited about it. The last bed that need immediate attention is the garlic bed (which doesn't have garlic in it right now), which need a new box. We discussed expanding it and putting the lavender in the ground there, but I'm worried that having big lavender and rosemary plants in one bed will be too much competition for the plants in the bed. We'll see.
Josh is threatening to get us some bees this summer, an exciting prospect. I'll let him write that up later.
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