I don’t generally enjoy growing things that grow under the ground as I can’t see the progress. Carrots, beetroot, and garlic are the ones that come to mind first. Obviously I still grow them but they make for boring garden tour specimens.
Today I decided to tentatively pull out the first garlic. I have a hit and miss history with garlic, a couple of bad years with tiny bulbs and a couple of good years. Last year was the best. I pulled a few out just to make room for some transplants. I was pretty excited!!! The joy oh the joy. I love love love gardening!!!!
Turns out it is infectious. I couldn’t stop there. So I pulled the lot out.
There were 66 bulbs in all. I planted 74 so that isn’t too bad. These are the sorts of sizes I got.
I separated them in to 3 groups, no science, scales or measuring involved. Small, medium, large. Pretty self explanatory in the photo above. When I sorted them the lines got a little blurred as to what constituted S/M/L.
Of course nothing has truly been achieved until it is assessed and approved by both the boys.
I counted
Large 16
Medium 26
Small 24
Some of them were in the wrong pile but I won’t actually do anything with this information so inaccuracies don’t worry me. I put them on my upside down green house with a fly screen on top for aeration. When we moved into this house my grandfather made these for us as a housewarming present. In Australia who sells a house without fly screens is beyond me! He also made one for the laundry window which we have never been able to open so I treat this as a spare. It is good for drying things on. He certainly made it well.
In a couple of weeks I will plait them and hang them. I will probably rearrange them a couple of times before then to even out air exposure. Hopefully they last all year. I just composted the last of last years batch last week. This is almost a month earlier than I harvested last year (crazy weather!) So that is around 11 months of storage, fantastic. I would love to have that again. This batch right here were grown from that lot so hopefully I can expect a similar storage length.
ADDIT: I forgot about the garlic in the corn bed, upon closer looking I can actually see it in the photo above that has the corn in the background. Oops. I harvested another 3 Large, 5 Medium, and 2 Small. This brings the total up to 76 from 74 intentional plantings. I think that I was not careful enough when separating some of the cloves and some doubles got in. These resulted in 2 heads of garlic growing almost joined to each other. They only grew to small or medium in this sort of non ideal planting scenario.
Billy & Franklin 