That is what it is called when you bust up garlic bulbs into individual garlic cloves and that is what we did most of the day Tuesday with the help of CJ.

It is not that hard of work. We get to sit around. sit being the keyword, listening to the radio, and busting up garlic.

It is repetitive and your thumb will get sore from peeling that much garlic. We have found that rubber finger pads, like they use at the post office for sorting letters, are a big help.

Jenifer has always been faster than me at peeling garlic, but CJ was a garlic popping machine. She put rubber finger pads on both her thumbs and went to town.

I call that just showing off….

Garlic Varieties

Most of what we will be planting Saturday will be a hardneck variety called Music and a softneck variety called Inchellium Red.

We will be planting much smaller amounts of 7-8 varieties of both hardnecks and softnecks to build up a seedstock supply. It will probably be two years before we have enough of those varieties to sell at market.

Garlic is our longest term annual crop. Planted in October and harvested in mid-June, it is 9 months to fruition.

Prepping Garlic Beds

I hear your thoughts – “Is he ever going to shut up about the garlic?”

I am a little obsessive I guess about garlic. Especially since I held back 85 lbs of some of the best garlic we have ever grown for seedstock last year but did not get it planted till late February because of a wet winter and ended up with very small bulbs and nubbins of garlic.

Jenifer has told me multiple times, concerning this year’s harvest, is that we got what we got and it is what it is so just let it go and shut up about the garlic.

I called my cousin Lindsey to bring me two truckloads of 2-3 year old aged leaf compost, which he did last Friday.

Wednesday, Jenifer and I spread, by hand, around 300 five gallon buckets of the stuff on the 18 100′ garlic beds.

The beds still have to be fertilized. The mixture I came up with is 8 lbs of worm castings, 4 lbs. of McGeary organic fertilizer, 2.7 lbs of azomite, 2.3 lbs of greensand, and .33 lbs of humate per bed.

That sounds like a pretty specific mix, like I know what I am talking about. Put down your pens and quit cutting and pasting. The standard rate for applying earthworm castings is 20-30 lbs/1000 sq. feet. Most organic fertilizers are 300-500 lbs/acre or 4 lbs. per 300 sq. foot bed.

The figures for the Azomite, greensand, and humate, I just weighed what I had on hand, divided by the number of beds I have, 18, and there you go. Totally unscientific.