More Garlic Info

As I was online trying to find out more about the bulbs I bought this year I found another garlic site.  These were the descriptions I found for the ones I was unsure of:

Brown Saxon (Rocambole) - This is a unique Rocambole with large brown cloves; harvests late.  Double cloves are rare.  A strong character and great storing qualities.  Averages 7 cloves per bulb.

Russian Red  (Rocambole hardneck variety) - This is another variety that has done very well for us.  It has a strong garlic flavor and has a warm sweet aftertaste.  It is a NW heirloom brought to British Columbia by Doukhobor immigrants from Russia in early 1900's.  Averages about 4 cloves per bulb.

Now I have seen Russian Red and Red Russian, depending on the site i have seen them listed as a Porcelian, Purple Stripe and Rocambole and I’m not entirely certain which one mine is.  I want it to be a Marbled Purple stripe but it couple be a Porcelain.  There are 6 cloves per head so that doesn't help too much. I am going to continue to read more about it to try to figure it out.  And if all else fails i will wait until it forms scapes and base my decision on the scape and resulting bulbils.

Gourmet Garlic Gardens
Wisconsin Garlic

Clean Up

Today was the beginning of my fall garden clean up.  I know that fall isn’t here quite yet, but the weather has been changing in the last couple weeks.  Today I pulled out the peas in the middle garden.  These were the plants that that had left peas on so that I could save them for seed.  This is a picture of the plants before I removed them.

 The peas that I picked off are all at various stages of drying.  Some pods are completely dry and black looking, and others are still green.  I am going to leave them in a flat all spread out to continue drying.  I have read that you can leave them in the pods until you need to plant them in the spring, so at lease I don’t have to worry about them being in the pod too long. 

After removing the peas I dismantled the trellis, and used my new garden tool to work up the ground.  Im not entirly certain what the name of the tool is, but it is amazing for breaking up the soil. This is where the garlic is going to be planted in about 6 weeks.  I will be adding more manure to the soil and am debating on planting some buckwheat as well.

Weekend

So today when I was at the Farmer’s market I was able to get another variety of garlic, it is called Brown Saxon.  I took a picture with all the info on it and this is what it said “this is a unique Rocambole with large brown cloves; harvests late.  A strong character and great storing qualities”

This gives me 7 varieties now, polish white, McEwen’s red, music, red Russian, northern Quebec, Georgian fire and brown Saxon.  This is all that I am going to grow next year.  My original plan of buying from the Garlic Farm in B.C. has been abandoned.  When I found out that I was able to get some of the varieties I wanted locally I decided I would rather buy it locally and save myself some money even if I couldn’t get all of the varieties I wanted.

I was also talking to the guy that grows it.  He let me know that the Red Russian I bought a couple weeks ago is a purple stripe (wondering if it might be marbled purple stripe). I was also able to get planting and harvesting info.   He also said that he usually plants all of his garlic the week of Thanksgiving.  This year he cut the scapes off around Canada Day.  As well he mentioned that the Music and Red Russian are both very consistent garlic, cut the scapes off and then 2 weeks later they are ready to come out of the garden.  But the northern Quebec is a trickier garlic and you have to watch it more  because it is a later maturing variety and will be a couple weeks later.

Today I also went over the field to check out that garden.  I picked few cucumbers and there are a few left thereon the plants, but they are dying off.  There were tons of cherry tomatoes both red and yellow.  My cousin also wanted to dig up some potatoes.  Now because of the heavy clay soil none of the potatoes have gotten very big, they are all miniature potato size.  We dug up some river john blue, baby reds and one plant of banana fingerling.  The fingerlings only had like 2 potatoes on the whole plant.  Disappointed but not surprised.   There was also one potato plant that was planted in the leaf compost pile.  It was planted a week sooner than everything else but because of the extremely loose soil 2 of the 7 potatoes we got off it were the size of soft balls.  They looked terrific and I let my cousin have them.

Spring Planted Garlic

Yesterday I picked the 3 garlic cloves that I planted in the top bed.  I only planted 3 cloves of music that I had forgotten about in the cellar from last year.  The cloves that were planted were all different sizes.  The plant at the back had the largest clove and the ones in the front were smaller.  As I mentioned last week, I have been trying to decide when the best time to harvest garlic is.  In the picture below you can see that each plant is at a different stage of maturity, so I decided to pick all 3 so that I could see which one looked the best.

This is a picture of the largest garlic plant.  The bottom 3 leaves were completely dead and the tips of all leaves were dead. 

This is another picture of all 3 plants; it starts with the smallest and greenest plant on the left to the largest and most dead plant on the right.  The plant on the far left is almost completely green still and could have used more time to ripen up.

This is the close up of the largest bulb.  As you can see it has started to breakout of its wrapper.  This is detrimental to the storage life of the bulb and means that I left it in the ground too long.  The wrapper has started to deteriorate providing less protection for the bulb.

The bulb in the middle is just about the perfect ripeness from what I have been reading.  It does only have 1 ½ dead leaves but it has a full bulb with outer wrappers starting to dry.  This is going to be the look I want for all of the bulbils that are still in the garden.  I might let some of them wait until the bottom 2 leaves are dead along with a couple leaf tips, but we will see.

The following pictures are closeups of the 3 plants:

These are the shallots that have been drying in the blacksmith shop.  I figured it was time to cut the tops off of them and put them in storage.





Garden Update

Everything in the garden has been going pretty well except for one row of carrots and the beans that are beside them.  Earlier in the year I was finding beans that had the bottoms broken off of them but I didn’t think much about it.  The other day when I was in the garden I noticed that the row of carrots beside them were looking wilted, they were wilted because some pilled buggers ate the top on the carrots that were above ground!    They only touched the carrots themselves and not the carrot greens. 

After looking at them it appears to have been some little rodent, I'm guessing either mice or voles.  I have seen some around, but there are a number of cats that roam from the nearby farms that will homefully keep what ever population there is of them low.  The good thing is they only touched that one row of carrots, and it was the row that was sort of underneath the beans.  That is something that will be a big focus next year, proper spacing.  The carrots are on the left.

Other than that little mishap I have been harvesting carrots, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and zucchini on a daily basis.  The carrots that were grown in the root box beside the she have done terrifically.  They are all perfectly straight and well formed.  The picture below is contanier carrots.

The carrots in the actually garden that were planted earlier are also looking good.  They are significantly larger, but have been in the ground longer.  They are not as straight and the germination rate was lower that the box. The picture below is garden carrots.

My peppers are still looking great! I have let a few ripen to red before eating them and they are definitely sweeter than the yellow ones.  The plants are still blooming and are definitely very prolific producers.

The cherry tomatoes and yellow pear are doing ok.  I am having a problem with some of them splitting as they ripen, but think that that might just be because of the heavy rain we had in the last week.  I have finally been able to pick a few Cherokee purple.  They all have heavy splitting at the stems but are big tomatoes.  I cut into one today and was not disappointed.  It was incredibly juicy, and went very well on the large sandwich I was having.  They plant itself isn’t huge like prior tomato plants and has significantly less foliage, the tomatoes are easy to see but after what's on the vine is picked it doesn’t look like it will continue producing.  I will have to eat some more before I decide if it is a variety I would want to plant again.

Today I also planted some bok choy and kale for the fall. The kale should do well, but I'm not sure how the bok choy will do.  The spring planting was hit pretty hard by the bugs but hopefully these will do better.

I also planted my first cover crop!  The buckwheat I bought in the spring was planted in the bottom bed where the garlic was before.  I barely used any of the seed I had so I will be looking to plant more of it this fall.

Garlic

This is going to be a post all about garlic.  I have been reading up on garlic since the spring and was able to plant some bulbils I was able to get at a local seed exchange (McEwen’s Red which I was told is a marbled purple stripe, Polish White a soft neck variety) and a couple cloves of Music I had leftover in the spring.  They have all done very well, but for the fall I would like to greatly increase the garlic varieties I grow. 

Right now I am planning on buying cloves of Georgian Fire, Central Siberian, Siberian and one more variety that I haven’t decided on yet.  They will be planted in my middle garden bed around the end of September.  I am looking to plant them 4 inches deep and will probably not mulch them.  I had trouble last year with voles eating my mulched asparagus roots and do not want to have a repeat of that.

I do live farther north and snow is usually pretty extensive and rarely disappears completely before March.  But we have also had snow as early as mid-October and it almost always snows on Halloween so waiting until late October to plant seems like it might be too long.  So will be targeting anywhere from the Sept 24^th weekend to October 10^th Thanksgiving.

One of the most challenging things when looking for garlic information is that I have had trouble finding information pertinent to my growing area.  Most of the garlic produced in Ontario seems to either take place in southwestern Ontario or eastern Ontario.  Both of which are located around lake Ontario and have a much more temperate region than ours is further north.

These are all resources I have found while searching the web, most of them reference Ontario Garlic Production:

OMAFRA - Garlic Production
Garlic Growers Association of Ontario
Garlic Farm - Growing Garlic
Seeds of Diversity - Growing Garlic
Tiny Farm Blog - Garlic Planting - From the description of the farm, the are located around Peterbourough
The Cutting Veg Garlic Growing in Brampton
Garlic Growing Paul Pospisil - Beaver Pond Estates Zone 5A Ontario
Colorado State Tests
Hood River Garlic
Snake Root Farm Mulch

Peppers and Garlic

Due to my lack of time, I am able to get out into the garden but not update the blog, and the pictures I do take, take me weeks to get up.   Last week on Aug 2^nd I cut off 3 garlic scapes from the bulbils I planted this spring.  I was surprised to find scapes on them due to their tiny size at planting.  They do however get full sun and lots of water.  I have harvested the garlic I planted in the bottom bed  and anticipate harvesting this garlic in the next week or so once it starts to die down.  I have found a few different opinions on when to harvest it( the bottom 3 leaves are dead, 40% of the plant is dead, 60% is dead)  so I think I will just pull a few plants at a couple different stages to figure out the best time to harvest them.

The plant in the middle back has the scape, and as you can see it curls off to the left of the picture.

My banana peppers are dong very well, and I am quite pleased with them. I have 6 plants in the garden that all have 4-7 peppers currently on them, and then 6 more in containers.  A couple of the plants in containers might be cal wonder golden  but not really sure as that variety didn’t germinate well at all,  less than 10% success rate.  And then I had some plants die in the pots.  I only have one red pepper so far but the fact that they are banana peppers eating them when they are yellow is probably not a problem.  But I will let some change color to have a variety.

Those are 2 plants side by side, I added at the end of a row of peas.

Thats my red pepper  and then the bottom picture is the plant at the end of the row.  It needed a tomato cage because during the heavy rain about 3 weeks ago it got take out.