Garlic Planting 2015

I started this blog in September 2012 with planting garlic.  The purpose of the blog was to provide myself with a diary of work in my garden.  I had tried many methods of keeping track and all had failed.  This was my last resort to log garden activities - successes and failures - and I started with garlic.  Three years and one month later, I'm planting garlic again.  I'll save the retrospective for another post and just get on with the garlic!

This year, the garlic is being planted in the bed that previously was home to onions - NOT an ideal decision on my part, but this bed was good and rich.  The onion crop was outstanding.  This bed is the only one that is totally free of planting and was going to be topped with good old SeaSoil, so we'll just see how we get along!

First the bed was turned over and raked.  I got the bulbs ready having saved the best bulbs from this year's harvest.

I set the bulbs beside where their rows would be.  This year I planned to have double rows of each variety and since I don't think I really grew enough last year, I have 8 bulbs to plant.  Hopefully that will be enough. In the picture above, from the top are Leningrad, Czech, Spanish Roja, Porcelain and an unknown variety I've been growing for years.

I carefully peeled back the papers and gently pried out the cloves, setting them in place and then pushing them into the ground just up to the top of the clove.

Finally, a wheelbarrow load of SeaSoil was raked over the top and the whole planting left to soak up the winter rain.  Garlic doesn't like competition from weeds so it's important to give it a good mulch.  This year's planting takes up just over half of one concrete raised bed.  In a few weeks I may find the first brave green spikes thrusting up through the mulch.

A few cloves were determinedly stuck together and these were brought into the house for consumption.  In spite of the poor garlic year in which many people bemoaned the poor garlic harvest, Leningrad and Porcelain have produced magnificent cloves.

Garlic taken care of, a quick look around the garden showed that the Brussels Sprouts are finally starting to form.  Whether or not they'll be ready in time for Christmas - who knows!

Bright Lights Swiss Chard is delighted that the cooler weather is here and looks just as beautiful as it tastes.

The heritage Italian beans had been harvested and brought into the potting shed to start drying.  Today I brought them into the house to finish.  It won't take long to complete the dehydration and then I'll shell them and store them away for planting next year.

Bean Strategies and Dealing with a Tomato Glut

This year we set up a bean arbour in hopes of providing a solid structure for the heritage Italian beans.  The vines are incredibly vigorous with large leaves.  The first year I grew them in with the corn in a Three Sisters Garden.  They proved too much for the corn and broke the plants under their weight.  Last year they were on the bean rack my husband made me, but since it was 8' tall, I couldn't reach the beans at the top and lost a lot of the crop.

This year I decided to try a bean arbour.  My daughter grows beans very successfully on a metal garden arbour and I thought, why not try something like that much bigger - like a grape arbour.  So last May, my husband built me my bean arbour which spans 2 concrete raised beds.  It is covered with bean vines!  So much so that that the beans are again trying to escape.  Some vines have managed to latch onto the corn which is now thankfully finished.  Others have tumbled into the Queen of Denmark rose which is behind the beans.

The solution seemed to be to provide more avenues for escape and to that end, we set up ropes which tie onto the fence behind the garden.  Then I twined loose vines on the ropes to encourage them.  We should have done this long ago, but at least there's another month or so of growing time.  And it will certainly be easy to pick these beans!

Meanwhile, the tomatoes are flourishing.  Today I picked a good 25 pounds of Health Kick tomatoes - and this just from 6 plants!  These tomatoes will go into Zippy Salsa and Tomato Soup but there will still be lots left over to give away.

The tomato plants are far from finished - there are still lots more on the road to ripening and I have yet to harvest from the Principe Borghese plants.

I was worried that it was too hot for the Brussels Sprouts planted earlier this summer.  They are doing just fine, thank you, and hopefully will provide homegrown sprouts for Christmas dinner this year.

And as for apples, we are already picking Macintosh, and the Liberty isn't far behind.  This poor little tree struggles each year with its enormous crop of small, red, scrumptious apples, branches bending to the ground.  One of our favourite apples for fresh eating.  The drought we're experiencing is hitting the apple trees hard and we've purchased watering bags which zip around their trunks and provide a slow drip of water to help them out.

El Nino in the Garden 2015

This is turning out to be the driest year we have experienced in the garden and many of the crops are showing stress in spite of all the water that I'm giving them.

Butternut Squash

Many crops are very early.  Strawberries were weeks ahead of time and the crops were pretty good.  The corn is loving the heat, as are the beans.  Other heat-loving plants like peppers and squash are quite happy so far, but they all need water.

Fruit trusses on Health Kick Tomatoes

The tomato plants are huge and early on set a bumper crop of fruit, but now the flower trusses are not setting.  I've had to really keep an eye on this bed because it's one of the beds that cedar roots have managed to creep into.  I hadn't realized what was happening and almost lost one Principe Borghese plant before I discovered how dry the soil was. (Update 5 hours later:  with a temperature of 28C and a strong wind, the tomato plants were losing moisture so quickly that they were starting to wilt and a second deep watering was required.)

Principe Borghese Tomatoes

In checking back, I can see that most years at this time the fruit is just starting to turn on early tomatoes.  We've been snacking on Gold Nugget and Sweet Millions for a couple of weeks now!

Corn is a heavy feeder, too, but this bed is maintaining a good quality of moisture and I think it's the tallest corn we've ever had.  I'd say we're only a couple of weeks off harvest for the corn and the Italian heritage beans haven't even started to flower yet!

Signs of aphids on the kale

Kale is a cool weather lover and it's really struggling in the heat.  I've noticed leaves are starting to curl up and there are signs of aphids starting to make their homes in the leaves.  I'm picking those off, and the kale is getting lots of water, but the heat is telling on their general health.

Harvested garlic sorted into varieties

I just finished harvesting the garlic and am quite disappointed with the size of the bulbs.  This might be because of the heat.  They reached maturity a couple of weeks early and this means that time that might have been spent growing was lost.

Copra Onions starting to fall over

This was also true for the onions.  The yellow onions have already been harvested and I'm seeing signs that the Copra plants are approaching maturity.

And this makes things difficult for the young Brussels Sprouts plants which were just transplanted.  I will probably have to rig up some sort of shade for them to carry them through to fall.

Everything else seems to be coming along well, but each day I'm out there giving the veggies a good drink.  The perennial beds have been ignored.  Water is so precious that only the vegetables and plants in pots are being catered to.  A newsletter from West Coast Seeds addressed this issue and also finished with the sobering thought that the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that there's a 95% chance that these conditions will continue through fall - and an 85% chance that they'll go through the coming winter.  Now that's scary!