Farm Notes is online! In addition to our regular CSA customers and farmers market patrons and the folks who shop at our stands, we have many ways to get our vegetables into nearby communities that don’t have access to fresh produce. We are glad there are so many volunteers out there, willing to pick up boxes of food every week, or willing to actually go into the fields and pick. Learn more!
We start getting ready for next year right now--we are sticking garlic cloves in the ground that will turn into full sized garlic bulbs in just nine short months. And we are also planting onion sets that will be spring onions in just six months.
Growing garlic is one of the easiest things we do. It's the post-harvest handling that makes it an expensive crop to produce, but the actual growing part is simple. We spread some compost on ground that has had a good cover crop on all summer, we turn it in and wait for everything to digest nicely. Then we create beds with an implement behind a tractor that lifts the soil into a raised bed. Then we turn into 10th century peasants, using a stick and a bucket. We poke holes in the bed--four rows, with the holes six inches apart in the row--and then we stick a garlic clove into each hole, quickly covering it with a flick of the finger. It takes us a few weeks to get all those little cloves into all those holes. The field is almost half an acre, which explains why it takes so long.
Then we spread a nice blanket of hay mulch over the whole field to keep the moisture in and suppress weeds. This year we bought another implement, a bale unroller, that makes the mulching nearly effortless. Up until now we have always mulched one square bale at a time, carrying hundreds of bales into the field and spreading them. It wasn't terrible, but it was real work.
In 2020 we planted the most garlic ever (1000 pounds of seed garlic) but this year we are going to cut back just a little and plant about 800 pounds. It turns into about six times as much as we plant, if all goes well.
