Garlic

August 1, 2010—from a Facebook post

Sometimes I think I should have just hunkered down and taken the extra calculus I needed to transfer to Cornell but then I realize that if I had, I’d have a real job in horticulture with real responsibilities and that would never do. As it is, I know enough to be dangerous* which is just enough to keep me playing in the dirt.

So, to the garlic.

I started growing garlic over ten years ago and had very good results for a number of years but when I went back to work, the gardens all suffered. Some years I didn’t even get tomatoes in the ground and the forty by forty vegetable patch became a weed forest. A few heads of garlic that had escaped harvest were left to their own devices. This feral garlic flowered, set seed, dropped seed, grew and survived all without my assistance or even my knowledge.
When I was laid off two years ago, I set about reclaiming the gardens. It chanced that the first bed I started turning was also the last bed I had planted garlic in. Almost immediately I was finding all sorts of garlic struggling among the weeds. Sometimes I would find clumps of five to eight little plants—a head that had remained in the ground. Other times I found areas that looked almost grassy from clusters seed bulblets that had made it to the soil. I saved everything I found and replanted them as soon as I had enough clear ground. I wasn’t expecting to get anything very impressive, and I didn’t. But I got better than I’d planted and there was a lot of it.
I saved the best heads for seed, gave some away and stowed the rest—all of it tiny—in the cellar. However, there was way more of it than we could use in the ten or so months it will keep and and in April I started noticing centers of cloves starting to green up and soon after the little green shoots poking out of the tops. I would usually take them out to the compost pile at that point but for some reason it went out of my head until this past Wednesday.
Now, normally, you plant your garlic in early October for the next year’s harvest. This is true of many bulbing plants but I have transplanted tulips, daffodils, etc on the same principles that I transplant everything—whenever and however I want—with a high success rate. So, there I was walking my old crumby sprouting garlic out to the compost pile when I started wondering if I would get anything out of them if I just stuck them in the ground now? Besides, you’d think that planting it earlier would give it more time to build up reserves before the main growing season next year. Makes sense, no? but I really didn’t want to do all that work. As I passed the garden near the heavily straw-mulched asparagus and blueberry patches I had a brilliant idea.

Hmmmm, what if I just stuck all the reject cloves right under the straw?
I used my dibber to poke holes through the thick blanket of straw around the blueberries. Half way through my stock of cloves, I decided that this was more work than I felt appropriate and I looked around for plan B. Fortunately, the bed next to the blueberries was fallow and had been under black sheeting since last year making a nice, soft, weed-free bed. So, I turned back about four feet of the plastic, scraped up the soil a bit with a cultivator and just spaced the cloves out on the surface. I then covered that bed with a good thick layer of straw (did I mention I always have spare bales of straw kicking around? and does it surprise you that I would?). Finally the gods smiled on my effort by sending a good soaking rain within an hour of finishing up.

I think I “planted” about three hundred cloves on Wednesday and I have at least thirty nice heads that I plan on planting in the traditional way this fall. I will pretend that they are my control.

Progress reports and final analysis to follow if I happen to feel like it.
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*Neoclassical Poetry allusion—Botany interfered with my social life so I switched to English Lit. which took no effort at all but I have to take every opportunity to use it that comes along.