I harvested two large shopping bags stuffed with garlic scapes today. I’ll blanch and freeze a bunch; but, this year, I am going to try pickling some garlic scapes too.
Tag: garlic
Planting Garlic
I planted our garlic today — an assortment of varieties filling one of the raised beds.
I only added about an inch of mulch to the bed. The garlic I planted last year never formed heads — we had lots of green leaves, beautiful scapes that we harvested quickly … but no garlic bulbs! Evidently garlic cloves need exposure to cold temperatures in order to form bulbs. You can actually mulch them too well! Hopefully I’ve got enough mulch to suppress weeds and retain moisture but not so much mulch that the cloves are too toasty this winter. 
Garlic
The garlic has sprouted and is about a foot tall — I mulched around the plants to keep weeds down and retain soil moisture.
Garlic Harvest
The garlic that was growing in the front bed for two years made some nice, large bulbs. The garlic that had been growing in the garden bed just this year, however, was pretty small. Each plant had a couple of cloves, but I think there was too much clay in the soil still. And growth was stunted. Or growing for two years help a lot!
I ordered more garlic for next year so we can expand the bed: 1 lb of German Extra Hardy, 1 lb of Chesnok Red, and 1 lb of Music. Also got half a pound of dutch red shallots and half a pound of French gray shallots.