Planting garlic

It’s that time of year when I can’t go anywhere without getting stuck behind at least one piece of farm equipment going 10 mph down the middle of the road. Some of them have no choice, really. They are as wide as the road; going down just one side is not possible. The soybeans are pretty much all in. Everyone is working on the corn right now. Even though I know that everything about the way we raise and use corn is wrong—bad for the environment, bad for the food supply, harmful to our health and the health of the animals we feed it to—I can’t help but think about sitting on top of that big ol’ combine, watching the stalks head into the chopper, driving to the edge of the field to offload a golden cascade of kernels into the waiting grain truck. How can that not feel great? If it were me, I would just about burst with pride.

Meanwhile, in my own little domain, we are finishing up the gardening. We finally got the last of the landscape cloth rolled up. Terry will rototill the rest of the garden except where the Brussels sprouts are still growing. Through an oversight, we did not start any from seeds this year. I had to buy an unknown variety at Klein’s. The sprouts are maturing from the bottom up. That is normal to a certain extent, but my favorite varieties have little difference in size along the stalks. The variety we have this year has very large sprouts at the bottom and practically non-existent ones at the top. Instead of whacking off the whole stem and picking the sprouts off whilst seated comfortably in a chair, I have to pick the big ones off the bottom of the stalk while it is still in the ground so the upper sprouts can keep growing. It requires a posture that is reminiscent of milking a cow by hand. I can only hope that we won’t get a hard freeze before the top ones catch up. (In reality, we are not going to be short. Actually, I’m not sure what I was thinking when I bought so many.) Also, the bottom sprouts have little Brusselettes. “Doubly compound,” Terry remarked when I showed him.

Brussels sprouts with Brusselettes sprouting from the bottom

We got the garlic planted on Friday. Hilda and I transferred landscape cloth from the Brussels sprouts to the garlic bed without rolling it up. I made the furrows. Here’s Hilda putting in the cloves.

Hilda planting garlic

This is what it looked like when we were done planting. It was too windy to spread the straw on Friday.

All planted and labeled

Early Saturday morning was calm. It was a good thing we took advantages of the moment because it was windy the rest of the weekend. Here I am spreading straw.

Me spreading straw

The final step in putting the garlic to bed was to tuck it in with row cover. We skipped this step last year and had straw blown from here to Kingdom Come. And I can sleep a little better knowing the garlic is nestled snuggly in the soil for the winter.

Under the row cover and ready for a long winter's nap