Fall Planting and Fall Growth

 

Yes, you really can plant garlic in a T-shirt and shorts...

at least, so far it has been working just fine on our farm.

One of the main concerns I hear is that the garlic will come up in the fall if you plant too soon, and it certainly does sometimes, but even 4 -6 inches of leaf emergence in the fall has, thus far in my experience, not slowed the garlic down in the spring at all. Infact... is there a possibility that the extra energy gathered from the photosynthesis of the leaves prior to winter actually speeds it up?! 

That is the point of planting garlic in the fall, after all, to give it a head start. But how much of a head start is enough, and not too much?

Julie planting Rocamboles and other kinds, Sept 22, 2023

I've written a post already about how I keep my seed garlic at room temperature prior to planting it (at the same temperature as the garlic I plan to store and eat for the winter) because then it doesn't break dormancy until the moment it is planted, meaning you can plant earlier and delay emergence by at least a week or so. I do that because it's easy for me to store it all in one place, but also, it's not that I want the garlic to get really advanced by the time it freezes over in the late fall. Yes, I agonize about warm weather popping those little shoots out too early, just like everyone else. I figure there is a sweet spot for fall growth. But, I do my best to pick the right time, when the weather and the soil is right, and once it is planted that ship has sailed. 

What I find interesting about the last two years, is the long period of warm dry weather we've gotten after planting on September 20th. I start to wonder if I might be better delaying planting by a week. The thing is, without cold, wet soil, the garlic doesn't seem to be in any hurry to grow, so it's kind of like pre-loading the soil with your garlic cloves and waiting for mother nature to pull the trigger. (The only concern you might have is if the garlic rots or gets eaten before it gets growing, but I've found it pretty resilient if you start with good cloves.) 

This fall, I checked on my planted cloves a week later, on Sept 27th, and other than a slight swelling of the root nodules, there was nothing happening, which reminded me of last year. 

Then, I checked on October 13th, and this was all that the porcelain cloves had accomplished:

 I expected the Rocambole cloves to be more advanced. Rocamboles have a shorter tolerance for temperature and humidity fluctuations bringing them out of dormancy. I actually plan to plant them on the last day of my main planting window for this very reason. But, for just being planted on Sept 22, by October 13th, this is all that the rocamboles achieved in terms of root growth, not even a shoot yet:

Turban varieties sprout even faster than Rocamboles, so I plant them even later, and just to highlight the differences in varieties, this Turban strain "Xian" was planted October 5th and looked like this eight days later: 

Mind you, the weather had also gotten colder and wetter, so the growth on that last planting may have been accelerated by that. The soil conditions were wetter on October 5th, which is why I only did about a hundred root row of Turbans and some bulbils with hand tools, rather than bring out the tractor and squish our clay loam into road ways that day. Our clay loam soil is why I plant on September 20th, and I don't know if it's just us, but this is what the field looks like 3 weeks later, nothing is up yet:

In conclusion, I plant my garlic plot within our winter wheat field, and pretty much follow the winter wheat guide, for planting time. The expert in our area says 10 days before September 20 up to ten days after, is the ideal time to plant winter wheat. Aiming for the middle of that window has worked well for our garlic for almost 20 years, no matter how unnerving the weather can get sometimes. Hope springs eternal, and for the most part, so does garlic!

Getting Ready to Plant Garlic!

I know most people consider it early, but at Golden Acres Farm, we always plant our garlic at or around September 20th. Our local weather pattern has been pretty consistent over the sixteen years that we've been growing garlic to sell. It's the one chance we can count on for the soil to be workable and we are able to plant in T shirts, and that's how we like it!  

I've always wanted to make a video on how to plant garlic (tried last year, but you can't hear me speaking for all the wind static). I might try again this year, but it'll likely be too late for some of you who are planting as early as we are. So, I'm really pleased to have found this website, through a generous garlic customer who recommended it to me. I agree with most of their advice, and am super impressed by their style (you can tell they are creative artists), still I will always recommend that you read with curiosity and critical awareness. How you apply the knowledge you gather is the key to being connected and grounded in your own experience.

Grey Duck Garlic: The Complete Guide to Growing Gorgeous Garlic from Seed (greyduckgarlic.com)

We are planning to strike our first four rows today, and are so grateful for the sunshine!

We've got a lot of the garlic "cracked" (cloves split apart for planting), and the stock remaining for people to buy is pretty low. I really only have Angelo's, Armenian, Newfoundland Porcelain, Darwin, Guatemalan Ikeda in any appreciable amount, and some of it might be in danger of getting planted here, if I have the extra space ;-) 

Thanks for a great year! Julie

Open for orders 2023

 We are open for garlic orders! 

Check out the printable 2023 Catalogue

 You can also find a list of the strains, what has sold out, and what is still available, on the 2023 Catalogue page.

And if you still have garlic to trim, consider making some hardneck garlic bundles this year. 

Here's a quick and simple method, on my recently published how-to video: How to make Hardneck Garlic Bundles (bitchute.com)

So Many Earth Worms at Harvest Time!

I love earth worms, sometimes it is so dry at harvest that they bury themselves deep and I see very few of them when I'm digging up the garlic, so the silver lining of a wet year is the gratitude I feel for those little immigrants who nurture my plants from the roots up. Years ago my sister gave me a book on earthworms (The Earth Moved: on the remarkable achievements of earthworms, by Amy Stewart)  and I learned that some types of worms live exclusively around the roots of plants, others, like red wrigglers thrive only on decomposing material, such as compost piles. The earthworms we know in gardening and farming are mostly European by decent, and compliment agriculture, by being vigorous and active - they decompose things too fast for the slow, gentle undergrowth of old forests, but we like them just fine in our fields.

So, harvest went well, in between the rains, and the garlic is gradually getting dry enough to trim.

Crop Update, July 21, 2023

Porcelains. July 19, 2023

What a fantastic year of upset expectations! For a few weeks in early summer I thought we were in for a repeat of last years drought, but the last couple of weeks have seen an exceptional turn around. With chances of rain forecasted for nearly every day, it's hard to plan anything ahead, but as you can see, the garlic is late to dry down, so there's still a chance that harvest weather will be nice after all! 

I expect I'll be releasing the Catalogue for this years crop on Monday, August 21st, so that we have a chance to get inventory trimmed and weighed.

We received several inches of rain fall in the last month, thankfully spread out enough that the puddles did not become semi-permanent lakes. Looks like the garlic stood it well, though I was going spare for a while, not being able to get out to the field to really look at it, or prepare mentally and physically for harvest. July  19th was the first time I've been able to walk out freely, on dry ground, for about two weeks.

 Early weed control - antique wheel hoes are great, although, the weeds don't stay small when it's too wet to keep at them! I find the old tools are so much more ergonomic than most of the modern ones, and actually bite into the ground, so you don't have to push down as hard in tight soil. This is what the plot looked like June 17th.

You can see a few runs where water washed across the top on the soil...thankfully I chose a good spot in the field, so nothing was under water or seriously impacted. I'm amazed how quickly the top of the soil dried off in just three rainless days...you can kinda see in this picture the thunderstorm that was coming in from the west (left side of the sky) as I rushed around and quickly snapped a document of what the garlic looked like at this stage, we got another 9 mm from that one, so not too much.

I've harvested Turbans, Asiatics and some Rocamboles so far.  Looking forward to breaking out the undercutter next week, and pulling in some big ole Porcelains and Marbled Purple Stripes! a week ago, I was joking that we were going to crave tiny paddles for them and they could just row themselves into the barn, but sunshine has an amazing restorative power on the psychie!

All the best with your respective garlic harvests!  - Julie
 

Black Garlic

 

I found the best way to preserve those early sprouting Turban garlics that you can never use up in time!

Black Garlic!

There is some controversy over black garlic, both over its origin and whether or not it is a fermented product, but there is no controversy in my soul when it comes to eating it!

Any garlic can be made into black garlic, though I've done some experimenting with different varieties, and the type of garlic you start out with definitely affects the flavour and texture of the final product. The machine used to make black garlic, and mainstream the process, was invented in Korea a couple decades ago, so many websites will claim that the process is relatively new, and that it originated in Korea. At the Guelph Organic Conference, this past January, I had the pleasure of speaking with an Asian woman who was selling black garlic, and she assured me that black garlic has been around a lot longer than the internet. It is a traditional ingredient in Asian culture, going so far back, she's not sure which country actually discovered it: China, Thailand or Korea. 

All three countries have been making and eating black garlic for as long as anyone can remember, but they used a very different process than the hasty, convenient method of putting it in the machine pictured above. Traditional black garlic was made in clay crocks, buried in the ground along with coals from a fire that was stoked and fed for at least 30 - 40 days...gentleman, start your campfires...can you imagine tending to such a task, all the while being uncertain of the outcome of those precious garlic bulbs, hidden away and protected by the clay pot? 

With great risk comes great reward! And, perhaps, there is no shortcut to effort. I wonder quite often if the commercial product really has the similar health benefits as the traditional black garlic. It's hard to say which one has been studied the most, and unless one can find the original paper publishing the results of the nutritional analysis, and said paper mentioned how the black garlic was made, or who it was purchased from, how can we really know what the information means? Quite often numbers just don't tell the whole story. They say black garlic has twice the antioxidants, and twice the vitamin C as fresh garlic. It also contains healthy tannins and has the added benefit of not giving you garlic breath. That sounds great, and I'll happily eat it up...especially with cream cheese on bread! But, also, another question to ask is what fresh garlic are we comparing it to, to say it has twice the benefit? Supermarket bulbs or locally grown organic garlic? 

In the end, it's pure garlic that goes in, and nothing else, so I figure black garlic is at least as healthy as the garlic you start with. I'm not sure if a machine you plug in for nine days has the same result or intention as a fire you stoke for 40 days, but I bought one such machine, and I feel the benefits.

Like I said in my first sentence, it's a great way to make garlic keep forever! Store black garlic in an airtight container, and it'll even keep at room temperature for over two years (a fact which leans toward the idea that it really is fermented, to my mind). 

I didn't start making it right away, so I can't say what fresh dug bulbs do in such a machine (there was a setting for venting/drying excessively wet garlic, but I didn't use it). I first got the black garlic maker in November, so I immediately did several batches of Turban garlic. It was so great, I discovered that Turbans make really lovely black garlic that is smooth and creamy. I can fit about 3.75 pounds fresh garlic in the wire basket that goes in the machine, so I tucked some different bulbs in with the Turbans to find out which varieties made the best black garlic (I made a map of the basket, lol, so I could still find them when they came out charred and transformed). 2.5 pounds of black garlic comes out of the machine, every nine days. Needless to say, I kept that machine going with new batches of bulbs for quite a few months.

I think October, November and December are probably the best months to make black garlic, with an extended period for varieties that keep really well and retain their moisture content, in the clove. As the cloves experience moisture loss, or prepare for sprouting, the texture gets more dry, they can get a charred taste if processed too long, and the flavour is compromised when they sprout.

My favourites for black garlic are Rocambole, Turban and Creole. All three are really flavourful, smooth and creamy. Porcelain holds up in any circumstance it seems, and makes for a solid product, with slightly more punch flavour-wise, and more structure, texturally. Artichoke Softnecks surprised me, because they were wholesomely flavourful once made into black garlic, with good texture to boot. Silver Skins are great and can be done after you are finished with most of the other garlic. Purple Stripes and Marbled Purple Stripes confirmed what we have been telling Garlic Festival goers for years: They retain their spunk, no matter what is done to them. Personally, I didn't like them as black garlic so much. It's not that they were hot (no black garlic is) they simply didn't have the richness and fullness you'd expect, and the texture was a little more grainy.

I just realized while writing this that I didn't do any Asiatic bulbs into black garlic, which surely is a sin, as it practically screams "Asian food" right in the name...Ah, well, project for next year!

We have a good stash of black garlic, and if any of you are wondering, you can certainly try some when you come out to the farm.

I'll end my post with a little game of eye spy in the picture below: can you spy our cloves of black garlic on the gorgeous, activated charcoal bread from Vann's Fine Bakery, of Stratford?

Planting

Sept 18, 2022

Well, I'm back tracking a bit, but now that this farmer's hibernation has been interrupted, I find I have lots to say, so I'd best start in chronological order.

The garlic planted for 2023, is on a 0.4 acre plot, only slightly smaller than last year's. The difference is, I put in full rows, or larger plantings of the most popular and best growing Porcelains and Marbled Purple Stripes, and reduced many of the others to a handful of cloves or just one pound of seed. I am trying to make it simpler, though I've been told that no matter how I try, I usually complicate things with great enthusiasm, so likely you will find me saving bulbils and selling all the specialty ones by the bulb as much as I can, for the sake of diversity. I have updated the 2022 Catalogue page to include a list of what I have in the ground, and what is planned for spring planting.

Sept 17, 2022

You can see how dry and dusty it still was in September. I planted earlier than I needed to, but, goodness, it didn't really seem to matter - the cloves just sat there until a big enough rain finally saturated the loose ground all the way through. It was a most unusual summer here. I once tried to dig a deep hole in the field, in July, but after scraping the top 6 inches of loose soil off, a pick axe would have been a more appropriate tool than a shovel - and - prepare for a work out while swinging that pick axe, while making tedious progress! The clay subsoil was that dry.

Sept 30, 2022

Nov 11, 2022

It was so dry, we were able to scuffle the garlic (and tine weed the winter wheat) in November.

Nov 11, 2022

 Some of the garlic was up by then, so we could kinda see where the rows of garlic exactly were. For the last couple years we have been putting orange or yellow stakes in every 50 ft before we close the furrow, to mark the rows, in case we get the chance to go over it before the garlic is up and that's been quite helpful, because our hiller can get off to the side a bit otherwise.

Another trick I've been doing is to plant the Turbans later than my other garlic. Turbans sprout so fast and are so frost tender, I'm trying to give then a break (since I can hardly save then for spring planting and be assured of the keeping quality). I got anxious and planted them on October 11, 2022... Who was to know that the weather would stay so nice. In my experience it usually goes in 2 month phases, based on where the jet stream is tracking (if it's making a loop above us we get hot and dry, or if it's pulling the cold air down, cool and wet). You never know when it's going to switch (or if it will).

Anyway, that's my very, very belated update on what planting was like last fall. I intended to make a video, but the wind was so strong out in the field it was beyond my abilities to make a functional presentation out of the raw video sequences. 

I'll soon be getting my Silver Skins and Creoles into the cold storage (with the carrots and beets), so that they can get sufficient chilling hours to bulb properly. If anyone needs carrots, by the way, we have them at the farm! And we sell them in small batches to Pfennings Organic and More, the health food store in St. Agatha.

Carrots don't get any sweeter, than when you dig them in the snow! Sugars develop in the cells when root crops are confronted by freezing temperatures. Some of the sugar even develops months later, in storage, for varieties like the Chantenay types that are good for our rich clay...so, actually, technically, carrots do get sweeter than in the December snow and are best right about now!

Not all of them look like this however! 

Only a few were dancing so gracefully as this one in their search for minerals in the soil.