Well I was able to find time to plant my garlic & shallots that I got this year from the Maine Potato Lady. It felt like an unseasonably warm October so I waited until close to the end of the month to plant my bulbs. I had a couple hours one evening before it got too dark and planted everything October 30th, 2012. It was a balmy 68F according to my double top secret treasure garlic map I scrawled on a piece of graph paper.
I planted three beds this year with a mixture of items in varying densities. I had two varieties of hard-neck garlic: Russian Red and German Red. I noted that the cloves I got with the Russian Red Garlic seemed to be a lot more durable and were easier to peel with out damaging the papery skin of the clove.
I got 49 large cloves from the Russian and about 25 large cloves from the German. At the end of the day I had about the same number of cloves from both varieties but the Russian Red cloves seemed to have way more large cloves.
All the cloves from these hard-neck varieties were way bigger than the soft-neck I planted last year. I decided to try the soft-neck garlic again even though I had limited success last season with this variety. I was able to pick up a package of soft-neck garlic from a local garden center which only seemed to carry soft-neck garlic. This seems odd for the New Hampshire climate, but I still figured I would give it a go. The cloves from the hard-neck garlic were about double the size of the soft-neck garlic.
In addition to the garlic, I am trying to grow shallots for the first time. I have had very limited success if I can call it that with onion sets planted in the spring so I figured shallots in the fall – why not…
The French Gray Shallots from the Maine Potato Lady were great for filling in some empty spots around some of my beds.
Due to some warm weather I did not cover the beds with some shredded leaf mulch until last weekend. This year I tried to really shred the leaves more with the lawn mower prior to raking/bagging the leaves up. I am also trying not to go as deep as I did last year. The depth of the mulch this year is in the 2-3” range as opposed to the 4-6” range. With three beds of garlic this time I am hoping to do a phased removal of the leaf mulch to see how that impacts garlic growth. Last year I may have left the mulch on a little to long and I think I smothered quite a few plants in the process. So time will tell.
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