GARLIC!!!!!

Well folks, the garlic is all officially done! What garlic? you may ask. Well, when I first got here, it had all been harvested and was hanging all over the place to dry.

Then, maybe a month or so ago, we started processing it, which meant cutting off the tall top, trimming the roots, peeling off the outermost layer of paper, and scrubbing off the dirt. Any bulbs with cloves sticking out got designated "Use ASAP," but most of them got stored in the root cellar to use until next summer when it gets harvested again. The best of the best bulbs, though, were taken out to use as seed garlic. Because garlic doesn't grow from a seed-seed. It grows from a clove. You plant one good clove that came from a good bulb and it replicates itself to make a new bulb.

So we had all these bulbs, but in order to plant it we had to separate the cloves. Easy, right? Well, sure, except that we needed 4,000 of them. And not every clove we pulled out was seed-worthy. Some were too small, or had spots on them and looked diseased, or two (or three) had grown together. So we sat and peeled off paper and sorted and re-sorted until we had enough. (This all happened in our living room, by the way, and I spent somewhere close to 14 hours over the course of three days doing it.)

We ended up with a lot of buckets or cloves and a lot of bushels of paper.

And then came the planting! The beds were prepped.

We "dibbled" the rows. (This thing is called a dibbler and is a really cool tool. It looks like a medieval torture device, but you put it over the row and then stand on it, as Nic is demonstrating, and it makes holes for the seeds, perfectly spaced out and all the right depth.)

Jason distributed the seeds.

And we planted them.

See the little garlic in its new home?

It was a fun group effort.

And then we found a bug that grossed out Liz Jo.

And the next day we spread hay over the beds. Since the cloves will be in the ground all winter (which is when they grow best) we have to protect them from freezing. A six inch layer of straw over all of it will keep the newly growing plants warm in the ground. And in the spring that straw will have turned into compost, so nourishing and helping the seedlings even more. We spread it out.

Occasionally stopping to hula dance.

Here are the four garlic rows in the big main garden, covered in hay and "put to bed" for the winter.

And then we all spontaneously fell in a circular pattern in the oats growing next door to the garlic. (Don't worry, we're not actually growing oats. Well, we are, but they're just a cover crop, so it's okay to collapse in them occasionally.)

Cover crops, by the way, are things that get planted so the ground doesn't just sit empty; they protect the soil from erosion, add nutrients (like nitrogen) back into the soil that whatever was growing there took out, will die when it freezes and, like straw, turn into compost in the spring, and, finally, cover crops are great for falling into and possibly hiding it. See? Can you see me?

No choruses of "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead," please.

And so ends the garlic! Until next year! The end!