Garlic

November 10th. Garlic should have been in already, but there it is.

I'd hoped to plant today, but the forecast was for rain all day.

So when I got up, I was pleasantly surprised to see clouds, yes, but rain, no.

Mike brought the garlic up from the basement, this year's harvest - or what was left of it - and we looked sadly at it and at each other. Not as much as we'd hoped for. (We need to research curing and storing.) I'd wanted to plant 300 cloves this year, and we certainly didn't have that much.

Once the heads were separated into cloves and the shrivelled and mouldy ones discarded, we had 175 cloves left. (The damaged ones were pressed and stored in olive oil in the fridge.) It'll have to do. Better than nothing.

Then we remembered the wild garlic. There were a few large heads with good-sized cloves. The rest were small but plentiful, and there was no waste at all. They had kept remarkably well - and we had 185 cloves!

This is what 360 cloves of garlic looks like (regular garlic in the green basket, wild garlic in the bowl):

The regular garlic cloves are now planted 2" down in a bed 18' x 2', and the wild garlic is planted in a bed 10' x 4'. Oh, and I found about 15 more garlic cloves near the bed that had been pulled earlier and left on the ground. They already had roots and most had sprouted. Into the ground you go. I know where I planted them, and I'll be looking for them in the spring!

If they all do well, we'll have more than enough for storing and planting next fall.

The rain started this afternoon. And I don't care. The garlic's in!