Project Garlic

The Garlic crop this year was fantastic! The bulbs have been hanging on the clothes line inside the house for the the past few months........

......and now it's time to replant. The first thing I did was pull all of the cloves apart and separate the cloves into 3 catagories...

1. 100 of the largest intact Music cloves.....

2. 100 of the largest intact Georgian Crystal cloves....

3. Everything else...

As I sorted the small and unidentified cloves, I pulled out the damaged or partially peeled cloves....

...and packed them in jars of olive oil to be stored in the fridge.

Whenever I need some Garlic I just put some in a food processor and grind it up fine.....YUMMY!

The sorting process takes quite a bit of time. One would think that it could just be done outside at planting time, but it took me about 4-5 hours to process this batch of bulbs while I was sitting on my couch in the living room, so I wouldn't even think about trying to do it outside in the pouring down rain with muddy gloves!

Once the cloves were separated you can see that almost every clove had a dried up stem sticking up out of it.

This probably isn't a problem for most gardeners....but for me it is. The problem is that when the ducks root around in the Garlic bed they find those little stems in the soil and think they are worms or something, and they pull them up out of the soil. They don't eat or damage them, but a Garlic clove that is on top of the soil will not survive the Winter. I like to snip them all off with a scissors.

The next day was planting day!! After prepping the bed by tilling with the broad fork, I planted the Music and Georgian Crystal bulbs about 5 inches deep using 9 inch spacing.

Some of the cloves were absolutely GIGANTIC!!!!

Of course the ducks like to help....

Pink Pink stuck by me pretty close, even after the rest of the herd got bored and left.....

The 200 large Music and Georgian Crystal cloves filled up one whole bed. I planted the rest of the intact cloves fairly close together in the empty potato tubs on top of the ground. I have a plan for them......I'm thinking about transplanting them in April after the beds have been tilled amongst my other vegetable transplants to be harvested as Green Garlic - because I've heard that they may help to deter slugs. The ducks get most of the slugs, but not all of them, and when the ducks are locked out of the beds during the growing season the slugs have a tendency to make a come-back. I'm wondering if any of you have ever tried this technique with any measure of success?