Planting the Garlic - Finally!

Today I finally got around to planting my garlic. I had been meaning to do this task for at least the last two weekends but something always got in the way. I had no excuse today! The weather couldn't have been any nicer. The high reached 54 degrees but it felt much warmer. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and there also wasn't any wind. First I had to finish cleaning up the kitchen garden. I tore out all of the dead tomato plants and then pulled up and cleaned up all of the morning glory vines. As always, that took much longer than expected.

Then it was time to build a raise bed for the garlic. I hauled in two garden cart loads of Nature's Best and built my garlic bed. Then I went to the extra refrigerator in the garage and pulled out my garlic cloves. I had saved, especially for planting this Fall, the biggest two bulbs each of both garlic varieties that I grew last year. I carefully divided the bulbs into individual cloves, being as careful as I could to keep the paper wrapping around each clove. I was more successful with some than with others!

After I had my planting stock ready I took everything out to the raised bed and laid out the cloves. I dug 1-2" holes for each clove and added a tablespoon of bone meal to the bottom of each hole.

I ended up planting 15 cloves of "Chesnook Red" and 12 cloves of "Russian Red". It is suppose to rain Tuesday, so that will be a great way to get all of the cloves nicely watering in and settled. Now I just need to buy a new piece of remay cloth and cover the row in a protective hoop. Hopefully, around Christmas time, I will take a sneak peek under the remay tunnel and find that my new garlic crop has sprouted!