After consistently inspecting the cold hardy garlic I purchased last fall from the Maine Potato Lady, and planted last October I finally saw what I have been waiting for. GARLIC SCAPES!
They are hard to see from as they are just starting out, but anyone who knows garlic knows what they look like. Last season my soft neck garlic that I planted was a pitiful failure and I had one scape and it ended up getting stuck half way up the garlic stalk before bulbing out and exploding the stalk. This year with the right garlic seed for our agricultural zone we are seeing dramatic differences. Below is a quick re-cap of where we started last October and where we are at the middle of June.
The 2012-2013 Garlic Season:
With bird hunting over, we planted garlic on October 30th, 2012. I had ordered two varieties in the late summer from the Maine Potato Lady. They were the smallest size package available and the varieties were Russian Red & German Red. The beds were prepared and we put the garlic in the ground. The beds were mulched with shredded leaf litter and left until spring.
Right Around the last week of March 2013 or the first week of April, we lost most of our snow on the garlic beds, so I pulled away the leaf litter to exposed some of the soil in the raised beds. Within a few days the first signs of life from the garlic beds appeared.
By April 20th things were really starting to sprout!
Almost a month later the garlic and shallots were looking pretty green, and it looks like I possibly know what I am doing growing garlic here is New Hampshire!
A couple weeks later and the Garlic plants are standing 12”-18” high above the raised bed boxes.
June 15th and the two hard neck garlic beds which are the two left most beds are doing great. The soft neck beck which is the right most 4×4 be is looking sparse and yellow.
And today June 17th we have most of the Garlic plants with 4-6” scapes starting to push out. Hopefully this garlic tastes good and we produce a couple of sizable garlic bulbs that we can use as seed garlic for this fall!
