I planted three 45' beds of garlic last fall, with high hopes for the 2012 harvest. I must have run out of bone meal, as I didn't pre-sprinkle the holes (I never plan to skip that step again). The lasagna beds were no more, so I planted the bulbs in freshly tilled soil, nicely amended with compost and peat moss. I mulched the beds around New Years, and have watched the growth with pleasure.
Today was garlic harvest day. And it was an utter, utter disappointment.
First of all, the physical labor was exhausting. Because of offset planting, the bulbs made a nice diamond pattern: pleasant to look at, difficult to hoe. So I hadn't weeded at all. But I was dealing with the seed bank of decades (if not centuries), and the weeds came up in force. With 2' weeds covering the ground, it's difficult to see the garlic heads themselves. And so I weeded as I went. All 540 square feet. That's a lot of squatting, stooping, standing, tugging, digging.
But the labor would have been almost pleasant had I had a decent harvest. But the garlic I pulled up ranged in size from a pea to a golf ball, average probably about a good-sized cherry. As the bulbs cure, they'll shrink.
The last two years, I've pulled garlic the size of my palm.
What went wrong?
Well, pulling 1350 garlic heads gave me time for reflection. I think it was a combination of factors.
- Initially, I should have only used cloves from the largest heads, not chosen the largest cloves even in smaller heads. This was probably a minor error, overall.
- I should have done the bone meal for fertilization.
- I needed to amend the soil much, much more heavily. Knowing where the soil was when we started, it seems rich and wonderful to me today: it actually grows grass, for example! But pulling the garlic was extremely difficult: the tilled soil had settled, with an inch of solid clay on the surface. It made it challenging to pull garlic (one whole bed I had to dig with the shovel), and reminded me that, even if we've improved our soil ten-fold, since we started at 3 out of 100 on the fertility scale, we're still only about 30%. We have a long way to go. Maybe in the fall I will make deeper, more fertile lasagna beds.
- As a corollary, there wasn't much life in the soil. I saw several bugs, yes, but very few worms. If a healthy square foot of soil has 25 earthworms, and I saw 25 earthworms (maybe that many) in 540 square feet, the garlic was just having a hard time. (And I'm guessing that figure of 25 earthworms should be measured in cubic feet. It just goes to show you can't trust everything on the internet.)
- We missed an entire month of rain during the garlic's main growing season. I'm guessing this was a biggie. Last year we had a lovely inch of rain every week during the spring; this year, we went without for a month. It never crossed my mind to irrigate the garlic (which would have been impractical anyway: they were all offset!), but it's something to consider for the future.
- I should have snapped off the scapes. I think. I had left them on because I wanted longer storability, and had read that scapes stand upright and turn woody, which helps the garlic harden off, too. So I left most on, since I figured I lost about 40% of my favorite variety in storage last year. Longer storability was what I wanted! I had snapped several scapes off one variety of garlic. The largest bulbs from that variety were, interestingly, all scapeless. The smallest bulbs (the ones the size of a pea) all had healthy scapes still attached.
The book had said that soils with low organic matter should be wary of leaving scapes on. But to me, my soil seemed so healthy, I didn't think it applied to me. In retrospect, I think it did. Furthermore, the garlic farmer who doesn't snap scapes apparently harvests in July. I hadn't thought of it until today, but an extra month of growing would have made a huge difference. Many of my scapes were still easily snapable by hand: they hadn't turned woody at all. But my leaves had shriveled and died, showing that it was time to harvest. Several of the bulbs had burst open underground, showing that they were overripe. But the scapes weren't finished hardening off?! I'm missing an extra month, here in the Virginia climate.
And so I ended up with the worst possible combination: no extra growth in the roots from snapping off scapes, and no extra hardening off from keeping them. Just a big bust. - I should have kept the garlic weeded: two feet of weed growth means the weeds were getting a significant amount of the water that the garlic could have had.
Combine lack of water, lack of nutrients, and growth focused on the wrong thing (the potential seeds in the scapes above ground, not the bulb underground) made for a disappointing day.
Happily, this disappointment didn't come last year, when everything else failed. That's a mercy.
And I have an idea on how to remedy the disaster next year, which I appreciate.
But between the chickens scratching through my potted on Goji berries in the little greenhouse (eep!), Phil flushing deer out of the orchard (what?!), and such a bust with the garlic, I'm feeling a bit like I'm beating my head against a wall.
And poor Phil went off to get a load of hay, mostly just for mulch, and came home to find he needed to put a tire back on the wheel. The boys had been playing with his tire jack in their water trough swimming pool last week, so he rescued the tire iron and put it in a safe place. Which he now can't remember.
So we're sitting in separate trailers at the moment, both trying to regain our equilibrium. I've mostly regained mine by writing about today. He's probably researching how to make a tire iron out of scrap lumber, or something like that.
Even if you can't trust everything on the internet, you can find a lot of interesting things!
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