Garlic planting prep 2019
Its that time of year… time to plant the garlic cloves before the ground freezes.
So this past weekend, we cleared out the VegBed4 of tomatos plants, stakes, basil, flowers and more.
It is about 28’x29′ or about 800 ft^2 give or take.
Added to that was 16 bags of composted manure, 15kg each, about 240kg total.
The big tiller fired up and we went through the entire bed in about 15 minutes.
There is still a lot of grass around the fencing, so we won’t be planting in it… there was actually about a 21′ line available North-South.
So we pegged two posts and ran a string between the two and then went through and made sample dibbles 8″ apart to see how many dibbles we could get in 21′.
The answer turned out to be 32 dibbles of 6 holes each.
Then we went in the East West direction to see how many sub-beds could be fit in the garden, with a 1′ gap between each for a walking path.
That turned out to be about 4 sub-beds in the 21′ long length and about 3 more sub-beds in about 16′, guesstimating maybe 25 dibbles in those sorted rows.
So we should have:
(32*4) + (25*3) = 128+75 or about 200 dibbles of 6 holes each, giving us a maximum planting of approx 1200 cloves.
We have cover cloth for use in the spring to try and slow down the leak moth issues, and we are also investing in some irrigation tape, to regularly water them in the spring and summer up to the end of June. This leaves July for them to dry up in time for harvest near the end of July.
So.. for the next few evening we prepare… predetermining what types and how many of each to plant (in increments of 6), get signage premade (cause if you don’t sign it when you plant it, you may never get around to it!), bagging those and also preparing 1″x2″x18″ stakes to staple the signage onto.
Hopefully on planting day, it will be warm, clear, not raining and not take more than 3 or 4 hours.
From 2018:
So the old signage comes off the short stake and gets reattached to the new 2 and 2/3′ long stakes. In addition, with multiple rows of the same type, we need to create some new markers so that *each and every row* has signage.
New for 2019:
Stakes that tall are too tall… you often get caught on sticks as you go through the bed… so we are cutting down stakes from 2.7′ to maybe 1.5′