Garlic planting time

I've managed to tuck garlic into 3 beds now, separating their cloves and poking them into deep, compost-amended soil.  I've had no trouble growing garlic, and we've enjoying eating it.  Perhaps I haven't grown giant heads, due to my parsimonious watering and fertilizing, but last year's harvest was a bumper crop.

I've used homegrown garlic to replant this year for the first time.  It's fun to continue that cycle, although some of the cloves aren't as large as I'd like.

a bed ready to be planted

The asparagus has flourished through the growing season, too, and is looking robust and vigorous.  After it goes dormant, I'm planning to consolidate two primary growing beds, to accommodate a couple of outliers that I stuck in place as an afterthought.

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Fall vegetables

Such a lovely sense of renewal comes with new seeding; fall greens are the promise, hopefully, of seeds sown now.

This weekend, I'm definitely planting lettuce, spinach, arugula, beets, chard, kale and collards in all of the beds not allocated to garlic!

I'll plant garlic from my own harvested heads for the first time this year.  I've put aside the largest heads (and so the largest cloves) to separate and plant out in late September/early October. Yum....

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Planting garlic

This afternoon, I planted garlic, which happily arrived yesterday. A slight ordering snafu had me receiving garlic in late November instead of late September from my favorite supplier in Oregon (Hood River Garlic).

And having been alarmed that I might not still be on their list (they're sold out for the fall season), I ordered more garlic (as a backup) last week from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (along with some French red shallots, buckwheat seeds (as a cover crop for next summer), and some Hmong sticky rice (for more experimenting).

But the rescheduled shipment from Oregon and the SESE one arrived together on Friday. Whoo-hoo! Happily, I can use all of it, and share some in our demonstration kitchen garden at work, too.
So I planted four beds of garlic and one of shallots this afternoon.

I had organized the potting bench area a bit yesterday -- it's looking nicer now....

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