First of all, the geraniums are still hanging in the cellar waiting for me to remember that they exist. I got busy and forgot all about the poor dears. I am going to pretend that I didn’t for get then and if they aren’t covered with mold, I’m going to try to get them going. I will report back on that if it ever actually happens.

Garlic report: Both of the test beds and the control are all doing well.
Remember that I planted my half sprouting leftovers from the year before in July rather than composting them and then waiting to plant the best of the new crop in October as usual.
The cloves that were planted last July in soil through a thick layer of straw seem to be doing the best. The survival rate is high and the stalks are almost an inch across.
The ones that were just placed on slightly loosened ground and then covered with a good thick layer of straw didn’t fare as well. Only a third of them survived but the ones that did are huge like the first bed’s.

The traditionally planted cloves seem to have had a 100% survival rate and the stalks look fine—about 5/8s of an inch, as usual.

I’m wondering if the huge girth of the July planted garlic is a good or bad thing and hoping that the rain lets up so that whatever I get has some decent flavor.

About another month and I’ll know!

Seed catalogs have started arriving.

It’s cold and icky out but I can look forward to spring from my cozy chair with all the pretty pictures.

This makes me happy

I think that just about sums up every article I’ve ever read. So, there. That’s taken care of.

It isn’t their fault. It’s me.

My grandmother was the daughter of a dockworker and spent her early years in Liverpool, England before coming to New York at 14, lying about her age and getting a job as a chambermaid at the Garden City Hotel. She quickly rose through the ranks and by age 18 she was the head housekeeper of both the Garden City Hotel and the Fort William Henry Hotel in Lake George, NY. She spent her time divided between the two depending on the season. In those days, the head housekeeper presided over the dining room as if she were the hostess of a grand estate so the dockworker’s daughter fudged her place of birth (she said Aintree, home of the Grand National) and developed certain ideas about what was what. One of the things she decided—and passed on to my mother and hence to me—was that geraniums were low class, common plants. Evidently, in 1890s Liverpool the only people who grew geraniums were the fish mongers’ wives.

My family history predisposes me to dislike geraniums.

My first ‘professional’ experience with geraniums doesn’t help matters either. Cropsey’s, the farm stand where I worked as a teenager, had just the beginnings of a garden center in the early ’70s. What displays we had were made up of found materials and leftover farm carts. The geraniums were displayed on an old high wheeled cart the bed of which was just high enough to make it impossible for me to comfortably reach the plants to  clean and deadhead them. As the new kid, I was always stuck with the job of cleaning and deadheading and for some reason there wasn’t anything I could stand on to make the job easier.

Unfortunate adolescent experiences prejudiced me against geraniums.

So, it is obvious that we can blame my mother and and my erstwhile boss, Gary, for my disdain of the poor Pelargonium.

Now, of course comes the part where I triumph over this devastating handicap by dint of my own herculean efforts and go on to live forever in geranium scented bliss. Well, sort of. The actual story is that in the mid-’90s I went to work in a garden center that was the retail outlet for a very large wholesale grower. Every summer morning I would trundle over to the greenhouses and load a cart with my pick of four acres of some of the best plant material I’ve ever seen. It is difficult to avoid thinking, “Oh, pretty.” from time to time when you have the choice of every  color and leaf combination in the geranium universe but I persisted in insisting that I hated the things.

That was over ten years ago. In the interim, I worked on an herb farm that had a wide variety of scented geraniums (P.graveolens and P. crispum) and I did kind of start to like those—especially one called “French Lace” that has crinkly, white edged leaves. And I started working at The Landscape in Newburgh (“the store”) which is where I still help out when they need me.

This year an old white enamelware pail that had been sitting in a corner of the cellar full of sand since we bought the house twenty-odd years ago was now, for some reason, in my way. I took it outside and dumped it thinking I could put it too good use only to find that the bottom had rusted through in several places. I set it aside near the cellar door. Before long, every time I passed it, sitting there in the weeds with its pristine sides and wood & wire bale handle, the thought “Red Geraniums”. Maybe it was the voice of my grandmother trying to make amends for so blighting my life but it got me to buy a couple of four inch pots of “Patriot Red” the next time I went to the the store to water.

Late in the summer, when everything was winding down and the annuals were starting to look dumpster-ripe, I  stopped by the store (mostly just to visit) and while there I picked up a large white geranium to admire how healthy it looked and Nancy said, “Take it.” Nancy hates white flowers and knows I love them. I didn’t have any plan for a large white geranium but when someone gives you a plant, you don’t turn it down.

Poor Poor Pitiful Pelargoniums

So, here we are at the end of he season with two geraniums that haven’t gotten the best of treatment throughout the growing season. i got over my reluctance to owning geraniums but it seems that my aversion to caring for them is holding its own. We haven’t had a hard frost yet so the geraniums are still out there the worse for wear but still managing to put out an occasional flower. I don’t have the heart to just let them die off when the dahlias, figs and cannas all have their places in the cellar so I am going to try the bare-root hanging upside-down overwintering method I’ve been hearing about since my days back with Gary at Cropsey’s. I’ll be following the guidance of Lee Ann Stark’s article “Winter Storage of Geraniums” at Dave’s Garden. This has always struck me as the craziest overwintering method ever but everyone who has done it swears by it. I’d be curious to see what other plants could be preserved in this manner and if I have any success with the geraniums, I’ll be looking around for other tender perennials to try it out on next year.

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.