In my September
Gardeners' Holiday post, there was one fall crop I didn't mention: our garlic. That's because I didn't actually know at that point how much our harvest would be. As you may recall, last fall we decided to try
planting garlic in our old rain barrel, which we'd already filled with soil in an unsuccessful attempt to grow potatoes. All that garlic got harvested in late summer and
hung up to cure. It was immediately apparent that we'd gotten more garlic from the barrel than we did last year from the ground, which yielded only six puny heads—barely enough to seed this year's crop. But we didn't know yet how much of that garlic we'd get to eat and how much we'd need to set aside for planting.
This week, my garden calendar reminded me that it was time to plant the garlic, so we took down the dried stalks, trimmed them, and started counting them up. In total, the 20 cloves we'd planted had produced 14 heads, ranging from in size dinky to substantial. The smaller heads had only about four cloves apiece, while the larger ones looked like they'd yield six or seven. We set aside five heads, totaling 24 cloves, for planting, leaving us with nine heads—perhaps 45 cloves—as our harvest. That's obviously not enough to make a serious dent in our garlic consumption for the year, but it's not bad for a crop that required practically no effort to grow.
Before I could break apart those five little heads and plant them, though, I had to prepare the "ground." In the month or so since we'd harvested the previous garlic crop, the soil in the rain barrel had somehow been taken over by mint plants. I have no idea how they got in there, since we certainly never planted them, and the barrel is in the back yard, nowhere near the fully contained herb bed in the front yard that's the only place on our property where mint runs free. But those persistent little plants managed it somehow, so we had to yank them all out before we could plant anything else. Fortunately, the soil in there is quite soft and crumbly, so the plants came out easily.
Once those were gone, it was apparent that the level of the dirt in the barrel was rather low—a good foot or so below the rim. This, too, was puzzling, since we'd filled the barrel pretty well up to the top when planting the potatoes and hadn't removed any. Apparently the soil, loose as it felt, had become compacted over time. To replenish it, Brian helped me haul out a big bucket of topsoil that we'd dug up while planting things around the yard. I shoveled that all into the barrel, then topped it off with the last few handfuls of the compost we'd bought for our
flower planters.
After that, all that remained was to break apart the heads and put the cloves in the soil. I had to consult a book to remind me how to do this, since I did the planting during my
Yom Kippur Internet fast. I had to do a bit of hunting, since not many of our gardening books mention garlic, but eventually I found one that said the cloves should go in one inch deep in rows two to four inches apart. Since the container is round, I made my "rows" a series of concentric circles, going from 13 cloves in the largest down to just three in the smallest. Then I poked them all in with my thumb to what I estimated was a depth of about an inch and covered them.
Unfortunately, I couldn't do the final step of the process: covering the barrel to protect the garlic from frost. We'd already run through all the free mulch we acquired last summer, and we don't yet enough fall leaves on the ground to use those. But the first frost is at least a couple of weeks away, so we should have time to either acquire some mulch or rake up some leaves before it hits. Then we can just sit back and wait for next year's garlic harvest, while we enjoy this year's for...well, maybe a month or two.
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