This years 2020 garlic harvest was better than average. We harvested across a few weeks, as it came ready, and finished in early August. After drying in the leanto for 4 weeks, we cut off the tops, cut off the roots, cleaned up the bulb and then weighed and measured its size using a garlic sizing template.

We are now (still) in the process of transcribing that data to get averages across the 90 odd types that we grew this past season.
I am of the opinion that the drip tape irrigation system contributed to the better than average harvest. We typically watered for 2 hours every day or every other day during the hot dry season in June and July. Then we stopped irrigation closer to harvest, letting the garlic start to dry.

Garlic was in Vegbed4 last season and will be going into Vegbed5 this season, as we always rotate the crops from bed to bed each year. The tomatos are still there at this time but we hope to clear the bed this weekend.
There will be a lot of tomatos and seeds in that bed when we are done so we start to prep the bed for a mid to late October planting of garlic cloves.

Saturday we hope to clear the bed of tomatos, then till it over to loosen up the soil and give the weed seeds (or in this case tomato seeds) a chance to germinate and grow a bit with the rains that are coming Sunday and Monday. After a couple of weeks (now into early October), we will lay down as many bags of composted sheep and cow manure that we can find (up to 20) and till the bed again, mixing it in while killing off the weeds (and tomatos) that have since grown.

Then a week or three later, just before the day we determine to plant, we will cultivate it (a shallower pass this time) just to get the weeds out.
String lines will be laid out, and this time 2′ between beds not the 1′ of last year. This is to help keep the bed in a straight line. It was a little too tight to walk down the beds.

We plant around 1000 bulbs, which we will have spent 3 or 4 evenings prior, precracking the bulbs to get out the cloves, of the seed garlic that we have selected even earlier. It makes for a nice few hours in the garage drinking wine while opening up the bulbs. They go into individually labelled paper bags.
We also gather up a master list of types, print off laminated labels to staple onto 1″x2″ x1′ stakes that mark each row.

On the day of planting we use a dibbler, a 2×4 with 6 wooden dowels spaced 6″ apart to create 6 planting holes at once, in a straight line. Then the next 6 are put in 8″ away and so on and so on. We get about 24/ 2/3 or 36 rows in each bed. Each bed is 30″ wide plus 24″ for a path gives approx 4.5′ for each bed and path. That goes into a 25′ vegbed5 six times giving us room for a total of 6*36*6=1296 cloves. Once each bed is complete, the string line gets moved over to the next bed.

Bag labels are double checked, cloves go in the hole, are raked over and the namestake pushed in at the path end of the row. Over and over again until we can take no more. This usually takes many hours on a nice morning, then a few more in the afternoon.

Finally, straw is set out, lightly covering the garlic to protect it through the winter, mostly from the freeze/thaw cycle that sometimes occurs in midwinter.

Hopefully the garlic will have a couple of weeks to germinate, establish some roots before the next heavy frost hits and stays.

You can also plant in spring after the ground has thawed. We have done this as well and basically the garlic is 2-3 weeks behind in development over a fall planting.

The 847 garlic cloves of 99 varieties in 142 rows are nicely to bed and sleeping under a coat of straw and snow.
Hopefully all will survive and grow to be Big Big bulbs next year!
They had a *lot* of composted manure this time around to help out and we will be adding in irrigation in the spring.

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′

The 2018 garlic planting is complete. Still no final numbers but on the order of 85 types and over 1000 cloves planted and covered. The bulbil project is also completed with over 50 bulbils planted and covered. Phew! The relief!
The weather has been worse than in past years, colder, wetter and grosses to be planting outdoors. It was not nearly as enjoyable this year as the last night of planting went well into the darkness with 1-2C temperatures and spitting drizzle.
Cracking the bulbs in advance was a great time saver, indoors vs outdoors.

We attended the annual Verona Garlic Festival at the Lions Club Field on Sunday September 2nd, 2018. I believe we have made it to every one since they started, but maybe? missed one sometime.
It is always fun to see all of the growers together in one spot, and as always, we tend to find one or two new types to buy seed for and try out.

Some folks have a *LOT* of garlic!