What a difference a few warm days have made this week for my fall plantings last year.
Below is a photo from April 6th, 2013 of this year. I learned my lesson from the 2011-12 garlic season and cleared off my shredded leaf mulch as soon as the weather started to warm in early April and the snow melted off of my raised beds.
Below is a picture from today April 17th, 2013. Things are definitely starting to sprout up!
So if you recall the planting map below.
If you ignore the poor evening lighting and over exposure of the photo this is the top-most garden bed. This was also the bed that was covered in snow the longest and we have a lot of good sprouting. This bed was mostly Russian Red Garlic with the biggest French Gray Shallots around the Perimeter.
The bed below is the middle bed which consisted entirely of German Red Garlic with the exception of a half dozen Soft Neck Garlic at the very top of the bed in the photo. The soft neck really seems to be taking off.
Below is the lower most bed. This bed consisted of 50/50 split of Soft Neck Garlic and French Gray Shallots. Once again the Soft Neck Garlic in the top of the photo really appears to be taking off. The shallots are just starting to wake up.
Just another cool sprouting photo. Temps have been getting into the 60’s and hopefully they will stay that way. I hit all of the garlic beds with a couple gallons of water that had some oh so sweet smelling fish emulsion mixed in. Supposedly this will give the garlic and shallots a nice spring wake up call, or so I have read.
We also did some plantings today and have been doing some landscape edging, and even started replacing a rustic stone wall with a more streamlined concrete block retaining wall, but that is a post for another time.