Planting Garlic

Today it was 63 degrees here so I took the opportunity to plant my garlic.  These are heads of garlic that I grew in 2009.  I will use them as my "seeds". 

You are supposed to plant garlic after the first frost but we really haven't had many days since our first frost to plant anything.  I tried to plant last week but the ground was frozen and I could not get a fork to pierce the soil. 

Brutus decided he needed to help.  He is always in the middle of everything. 

My raised beds in the potager are numbered so I can record where everything is planted.  Today I am working in bed 5.  I pulled out my fork to start removing the winter weeds but decided I didn't really want to turn that much soil over.

I switched to my shuffle hoe.  This is one of my favorite tools.  Turning over too much soil will bring a lot of weed seeds to the surface and believe me they will all germinate.  This hoe will loosen the weeds and allows me to pick them out and throw into the long-term compost pile. 

I planted 2 varieties that I bought in 2007 from Seed Savers.  "Music" shown above is a hard neck variety.  You can see the hard stem that grows through the middle.  The hard neck variety stores the best.  "Tochliavri" is a soft neck variety and it does not store as long.  You can see in the first picture that it has started growing indoors.  It grows even if I store it in the dark.

 I immediately come inside, take my spiral notebook, draw my bed and note what is planted.  I have dug up too many plants because I didn't remember they were planted there.

Thank you for joining me in the garden today.

Until next time,

Kclily