Garlic Gathering

The garlic is out of the ground.  Jason and I spent a good 8 hours digging, braiding and hanging the garlic this past Saturday. It probably took more time than that, but you lose all sense of time when you are out in the garden.  This year was a pretty bad year for garlic, and not just for us. The weather being so wet as it was, and the amount of rain we got through June, didn't leave much time for the garlic to dry out and much of it went to rot.  Well, it started out with a rust on the leaves back in June.  Jason attended to the rust by cutting off some of the rusted leaves, as it spreads by spores in the air, he then put a baking soda mixture on them, to protect the flesh of the leaves.  Even though we had rust on the leaves, most of these garlic bulbs turned out alright.  We did have a bunch with white rot (the most common), and a handful of black rot, and two bulbs with green rot...bizarre.   And the rest, is hanging to dry to plant again in the fall - and hopefully, next year, we will do better.   We started off planting 500 cloves this year, and have around 250 bulbs to plant again this year (each differing in the amount of cloves....anywhere from 4-8 cloves on each bulb).  We have about 100 bulbs that are either 'unknown' (because we forgot to label them along the way) or 'semi-moldy' (but okay to salvage) that we plan to use for eating.  Here is what we documented:

Unknown, 94 good bulbs, (which we will eat)

Georgian Fire, 15 good bulbs, 0 bad

Piteretti, 29 good, 2 bad

Russian Red, 90 good, 9 okay (experiment to see if they turn out okay after drying), 37 bad

Portugeuse, 6 good, 2 okay, 2 bad

Music, 19 good, 2 bad

Lenningrad, 7 good, 12 bad

Elephant Garlic, 11 good

Portuguese, 11 good, 7 okay

N. Quebec, 1 good (sniff, sniff), 1 okay, 10 bad

German Hot, 17 good, 23 bad

Notes to self for planting next year's garlic:

* always plant your garlic in a different spot from the year prior (up to five years)

* raise the beds (we will try making them higher this year) 10 inches is ideal (we will do our best)

* nitrogen hungry bastards - prepare the beds with manure

I think we would have done a bit better with our garlic this year if our beds were raised... the soil on our property drains rather poorly...and with so much rain, the molds could not be helped...would be different if there was better drainage.

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At the end of the day, I made a tasting tray of the different types of garlic, and Jason and I spent a bit of time tasting them and making comments (a little warmed brie cheese and corn chips to help them go down too:). Here is what we thought about the garlic we tried:

In order of favorite to least favorite (least favorite still being super delicious):

Piteretti - yellow in color - very creamy...mmmmmm

Portugeuse - yellow in collor, creamy, light

Music - white in color, sweeter than the rest, nutty in flavor a bit

Russian Red - white in color, very earthy taste

Leningrad - yellow in color, fruity taste like apples