Garlic and onions

Coming back down from the mountains (unexpectedly, for house painting purposes), we returned to heat and humidity. It was a decided difference.  But it's been rainy here, thankfully;  the rain gauge showed 3 inches in the last week and half!  So everything from containers to shrubs are looking good. It's nice to have an opportunity to check the garden-- that was our first order of business.  It's a good thing to have had plenty of rain!

One exception were the short-day onions, whose tops seemed to have largely melted away because of some sort of fungus;  I harvested all of the bulbs, though, which although small, hopefully will be tasty.

The garlic, surprisingly (or maybe not), had browned up and is largely ready to harvest.

I cut the scapes of the single bed of hard-neck garlic before harvesting; they're probably too fibrous to be good, but we'll see. 

The young leeks are doing OK, but also are suffering from too much rain, seemingly somewhat mildew-stressed.  I'll either hill them up, or harvest them as 'baby leeks'!

The garlic harvest looks good;  here are the results from two of my beds, ready for bundling up to dry tomorrow.

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Four seasons of gardening

A warm afternoon (more like an occasional late February day) encouraged moving leaf mulch, some light weeding and tidying of winter beds, and musings about planting time. In our climate, more of us should really think more about four seasons of gardening, from vegetables to landscape plants.

The winter honeysuckle is flowering now, prompted by the warm weather. It normally is in full swing by late January and February.


I think I'll sow some winter lettuce in the cold frame tomorrow and set up the heating pad and lights in the garden shed. I'm anxious to start some hardier transplants (kale, broccoli, collards, and mache) and sink my fingers into the damp earth again.

All the covered lettuce beds in Italy this time of year were amazing -- why not here? The hoop frames were simply providing a bit of protection and increased warmth (I think) -- no supplemental heat or light.

I ordered seed potatoes today from my favorite source, Wood Prairie Farm, and onion and leek sets from Dixondale Farms. If I'd kept better records (or had the patience to go back and dig up my notes), I'd know which potatoes did best here, and which varieties from my last year's experiments with onions were most successful, but basically, I love to experiment in the garden -- and every year is different, after all, even with tried-and-true varieties. I haven't yet sorted through my seeds (I'm sure I have plenty already, but maybe I'll find something new I need.... the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog is a wonderful inspiration).

I WILL be rotating more diligently this year (AND KEEPING AN ACCURATE MAP), hmm, is this a New Year's resolution? And, I'll be adding new beds to expand the rotations. Perhaps the trade-off for a mild winter climate is an abundance of potential problems, from fungal wilts to harmful nematodes.

But it's hard to complain about a mid-60° F day in late December, even if it's unusually warm.

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Onions and garlic

I've been growing garlic for awhile -- incredibly easy and remarkably delicious fresh. Green garlic is a farmer's market staple in trendy markets in Southern California (I know this because I listen to an interesting podcast from KCRW, a public radio station in Santa Monica, CA, called 'Good Food.' I discovered green garlic by accident, as I have had to harvest it early in the past (before the satellite garden) to make room for the summer tomatoes, peppers, and squash in my garden rotations in the main vegetable garden.

I planted lots of garlic, onions, and potatoes in the satellite garden, as I knew any emerging woodchucks wouldn't be interested. Sure enough, before s/he was relocated, all that disappeared were the lonely broccoli relatives that I thought I'd try, hidden among the onion plants. Hrrmph. But now that s/he is on to hopefully greener pastures, I'm thinking about harvesting more of the garlic early, and planting some other things.

Two onion relatives that I'm growing for the first time are quite interesting. A pot of 'Welsh onions' - Allium fistulosum -acquired at a local nursery last summer, divided and put in containers and adjacent to the garlic beds have flourished, becoming huge. I've been pulling them up along the edges and using them like green onions in stir-frys. A favorite podcast, The Alternative Kitchen Garden, mentions that there are both white and red varieties. A fellow sustainable gardening blogger in England grows the red variety as a perennial bunching onion, a plant that his grandfather grew.

I love learning about plants and their stories and where they came from. Certainly 'Welsh onions' fit that -- they're not Welsh, but Asian, so we really should be calling them Japanese bunching onions. But how did a pot of Welsh onions, labeled somewhere at a herb company, make its way to a small nursery in Pendleton, South Carolina, where I bought it? And my fellow gardeners in England are growing it. What fun!

These are red shallots, growing next to garlic. I'm not sure how to harvest shallots, but I'm sure they'll be tasty.

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