Thursday, November 3, 2016

Fall planting for 2017

In a marathon of digging, compost-spreading and planting, I got the garlic into the ground (a little late, since I aim for the second half of October, but it's only 3 days after that). Still need to get all the garlic rows (and the 10 shallots I also planted today) mulched.

Tally: total of about 150, broken down between 80+ of Russian and 60+ of what was supposed to be German, but I mixed up the heads during the harvest, so I suspect that at least half of them are Russian. I'm not too worried, because we still have a ton of the German stock growing wild, so I could always transplant them into a new bed and let them grow to their potential. I also have a significant number of rounds of the Russian variety that were transplanted in the summer and have sprouted, some of them to about 3" high, although I didn't keep count.

Big change from last year, when only 30 or so were Russian and 75 were German.

One thing I noticed today that I hadn't before -- the papers on the Russian ones are a lot tougher than the German ones, making it harder to break the heads apart for planting. Probably not noticeable when breaking up a single head for cooking, but annoying when breaking up double digits' worth of heads.

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