Garlic Patch 2020

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's a sunny, cool day  (8 degrees C at 12:30pm).  I started on the garlic patch around 8:30am, when it was still frosty out.  The soil in this garden is heavy on clay, and it was wet from the rain we had a few days ago.  Plucking weeds and working in cold, frosty, sticky soil...uhg!  It made the hot chocolate I enjoyed once I'd finished planting taste that much sweeter.

These are my garden shoes, after I'd pulled most of the gumbo off!

 

 

The patch this year is in the South garden.  Planted are:

Brown Tempest (Glazed Purple Stripe) - small cloves, planted in a rectangular plastic container at the front of the patch.

Northern Quebec (Porcelain) –   NQ bulbils (tiny, like grains of rice) in a round plastic pot at the front of the patch.  Also 3 rows of cloves.  Many of them were “fused”/double cloves.   The NQ wrappers are white.

Central Siberian (Marbled Purple Stripe) – 1 row, plus a few planted around the plastic containers. Small cloves.

Baba Franchuk’s  (Rocambole) - 7 rounds collected at the end of this summer.  The wrappers on the bulbs of Baba Franchuk's were so thin/fragile that they fell apart and exposed the garlic when I separated them, so I didn’t plant the cloves.  The rounds were planted in the same row as the Kiev cloves.

Kiev (Rocambole) – 5 cloves from the solitary bulb that made it through the summer!  Planted in the same row as the BF rounds.

Red Russian (Marbled Purple Stripe) - 5 rows of cloves.

 

 

 

The garlic patch was covered by some leaf and grass clippings saved from last Fall.  More mulch  is needed, so hopefully we can mow the grass and fallen leaves this week.