3rd week of October 2009
We had two glorious fall days after a cool streak and we were busy as beavers in the garden. I finished planting coldframe crops for overwintering (spinach, lettuce and arugula), we finally put in some winter wheat as a cover crop in the spring garden, tomato stakes were pulled out and we hustled to get garlic planted before rainy weather came again. Here the boys are separating cloves to get things ready for planting. I save back my biggest garlic heads for planting since a large clove will grow into a large head. After Olin disked the area the kids and I went to work raking and hoeing four rows in each of the three long beds. For planting time we had to be careful to keep the 15 varieties all separated and well labeled with marked stakes and on my map in my garden notebook. New types for this year are Red Rezan (a Purple Stripe variety) and Chet's Italian Red (a soft neck for braiding) and our old faithful Music made up about a third of the planting. After two afternoons of hard work, we planted 3375 cloves in a 15'x 130' area. My knees and shoulders were sore but it felt wonderful to accomplish so much in two days. We'll wait for another dry spell to plant a few more cloves (500?) in a bed behind the house plus add some "runts" to be pulled as garlic scallions in early spring. Garlic is definitely a crop that has grown on me, I remember about seven years ago I started with 40 cloves of Music and it has steadily increased over the years with this years crop nearing 4000. Some of that will be sold as seed garlic so if you want to get started, check what I have available next fall.
With sadness, we picked the last zinnia bouquet before a night of frost. It's always hard saying farewell to the summer garden but now we can look forward to the root veggies coming into their glory in the cool fall weather. Here are some we picked recently, a Daikon radish, China Rose radish, Purple Plum radish and a turnip. Even though they are huge and look like they would be woody, the Daikon is actually very tasty eaten just in large circle slices. It is an Asian vegetable and one ingredient in the kimchi sauerkraut I hope to make this month. Another large root vegetable was my German Lutz beet that was pictured in last week's garden journal. It weighed in at 3 lb at the Red Beet Festival but was just a runt compared to the 7lb 11oz winner for size. The shoestring beets, beetnik cake and red beet ice-cream were excellent that day - yum! If you want to join next year's beet growing contest, check with me in the spring for a tiny packet of German Lutz seeds.
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