Garlic and carrots

carrots from the deep raised bed

My deep raised bed has actually produced some pretty big carrots, in spite of my fussing about not being able to grow good carrots.  These are big, and tasty, too, especially when cooked.

Apparently in the mountains, I can start sowing carrots for fall in mid-July.  I think I'll do that!  Maybe they'll be extra sweet after a bit of fall frost.

A quick trip down to the Piedmont meant harvesting a block of potatoes and a lot of green tomatoes (I didn't like the idea of leaving them for the resident woodchuck).

Hopefully the tomatoes will ripen and be decently tasty, for cooking at least.

fresh garlic ready to use

I've 'processed' plenty of garlic; it's all cleaned and ready to use.

I'll probably use it up more rapidly this year, as curing conditions weren't so good for long-term storage.

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.

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....

Harvesting garlic

Garlic is ready when roughly half of the leaves are brown (more if soft-neck and less if hard-neck, if I'm remembering right).

In practice, if the stalks are tipping over, it seems like it should be time to harvest.

I've now pulled two beds, with two more to come. Over 75 heads of garlic are now drying in my garden shed.

(Hmm, I might actually see a return on my investment in buying organic garlic to plant, from Hood River Garlic, in Oregon).

Some heads I've harvested were downright huge, compared to previous years. Abundant rain is surely a factor, although variety is important, too.

We had fresh garlic and onions with mushrooms and garlic scapes as our dinner vegetable this evening. Yum.

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.