Category: Outdoors

It’s the easiest vegetable — and tasty too

By Henry Homeyer
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If you lean toward lazy (or have kids, dogs and a job), growing garlic may be just the ticket. It is the easiest of all vegetables to grow. Once planted and mulched, it requires little or no work until harvest. A good harvest is guaranteed if you follow my instructions. Even with all the strange weather we’ve seen, I’ve never had a bad crop in the past 25 years or so of growing garlic.

Now is the time to buy garlic for planting — unless you have some from your own garden saved for that purpose, as I do. You’ll want to get your garlic planted a month before the ground freezes, so depending on where you live, you may want to plant some soon. Garlic needs to establish roots now and is not generally planted in the spring.

There are two categories of garlic: hard neck and soft neck. Both will grow in New England, but hard neck is the type grown by most farmers and is the most cold-hardy. It produces a stiff scape or stem each summer that is edible. Soft neck garlic generally comes from California and is good in the kitchen; it is also the type braided and hung from the ceiling in Italian restaurants as decoration. Hard neck garlic generally has more flavor; a wide variety of flavors is possible, depending on the type you grow.

Garlic does best in rich soil that drains well. If you have a heavy clay soil (soil that is sticky when wet), you will need to add plenty of compost to your soil. Adding sand will not help, as sand added to heavy clay produces something like concrete that hardens up in dry times.

If you have poor soil, you may want to build a wood-sided raised bed and add plenty of compost and topsoil that you purchase in bulk or in bags. I find Moo-Doo brand composted cow manure and topsoil are good soil additives that are sold in bags in many garden centers. A 50-50 mix of your soil (or purchased topsoil) and compost should work well.

When making a wood-sided bed, I don’t recommend treated lumber. Even though most treated lumber is safe to handle and much less toxic than 20 years ago, I don’t want any chemicals leaching into my soil. I use rough-sawn lumber from a local sawmill, preferably hemlock. It generally lasts about 10 years. Eight-inch-wide planks are wide enough to make a nice box.
Plain pine boards will work, too, and metal corners are readily available at garden centers or from catalogs like Gardener’s Supply and Lee Valley Tools. The corners make constructing a garden box easy even for non-carpenters. All you need is a cordless drill to drive the screws. Carrots and other root crops do well in garden boxes, so you can alternate them with garlic in subsequent years if you build two or more boxes.

I generally use my own garlic for planting, as it has adapted to my soil and climate over the years. But if I see big, fat bulbs of garlic at a farmers market, I sometimes buy some. I don’t recommend buying garlic for planting at the grocery store as most has been treated to prevent it from germinating and so it will last longer.

Where can you get garlic for planting? If there is none at your local farmers market, you can get organic garlic from Johnny’s Selected Seeds in Maine (877-564-6697 or www.johnnyseeds.com). But don’t wait too long — they sell out most years.
Once the soil is loose and weed-free, I plant. I take a CobraHead weeder, a nice single-tined weeder, and make furrows in the soil of my raised bed. I keep the furrows about 8 inches apart. I sprinkle some organic bagged fertilizer into each row and stir it in.

I break the garlic bulbs apart, separating the cloves — there are usually five to 10 cloves per head. I push the cloves into the loose soil, pointy end up, about 3 inches deep and 4 inches apart. I cover with soil and then pat it gently.
The last step is key if you want a weed-free garlic bed: Put a foot of fluffy mulch hay or straw over the planted garlic. The straw will pack down over the winter and make a nice mulch that will keep most weeds from growing, but the garlic will push through it. It will be ready to harvest next July.
Depending on when you plant, the soil temperature, and when real cold weather comes, your garlic may send up a few green shoots this fall. Don’t panic! It won’t hurt your garlic. When cold weather comes, it will go dormant and do just fine next spring.

I believe that garlic is a healthy and tasty addition to my diet. It may even be medicinal — it has been used that way for centuries.
And this winter if you chew on a clove of garlic before going to the store, you’ll never get a cold — because people will stand back from you in line!

Henry lives in Cornish Flat, NH. He is the author of four gardening books and is a UNH Master Gardener. His email is henry.homeyer@comcast.net.

Featured photo: Place your garlic cloves on the soil to establish spacing before planting. Photo by Henry Homeyer.

Cut, pull, label, rake

To me, this felt like the summer that never was. It was rarely hot and sunny. The rainy gray days felt more like those in Portland, Oregon, than in New England. Even so, the summer we had is largely over and it’s time to clean it up and get ready for winter. Let’s take a look at what we need to do.

It’s time to start cutting back flowers that are no longer blooming. I like using a small serrated “harvest sickle” for the job instead of hand pruners. It’s available from www.oescoinc.com for about $8. I grab a handful of stems and slice through them with the tool, getting several stems at once. Of course you could use an old steak knife instead. I leave stems bearing seed heads that the finches, cardinals and other seed-eaters might munch on this winter. Wear gloves when you use the tool — it is very sharp!

I am conscious of erosion when removing plants in the fall. I think it’s better to cut off the stems of big zinnias, for example, than to yank them now. That way I am not opening up the soil, making it vulnerable to erosion or providing a nice resting spot for airborne weed seeds. Many weed seeds are tiny and can blow in from your next-door neighbor’s garden. I can always dig out roots in the spring when I plant something else, and they may decay and add some organic matter to the soil in the meantime.

Once you have cut back and cleaned up the garden a bit, you should pull all the weeds. I know this can be a tedious chore, it’s better done now than in the spring. Weeds in spring will start growing long before you start planting — and before the soil is dry enough for you to work it.

Weeding is easiest to do when the soil is moist. If you have big, deep-rooted weeds like burdock, you should use a garden fork to loosen the soil. Plunge the fork into the soil and tip it back, loosening the soil. Do that in a few places for a big weed. Then pull s-l-o-w-l-y. A quick yank will break off roots that will survive and grow next summer. Any weed that is loaded with seeds should go in a separate compost pile; otherwise the seeds could come back to haunt you, even years later. For smaller weeds, I like my CobraHead weeder.

And here’s a little-mentioned fall task: getting rid of the flowers that have not done well in the past few years. That’s right, not everybody gets to ride the bus. This is a good time to say to plants that have not performed, “You’re off the bus. Go live in the compost pile.” A plant that is too aggressive — or one that just won’t bloom — should be exiled. Next spring, that gives you license to buy something nice — you have a gap to fill in the perennial border.

What else? Place labels in the back right corner of any clump of flowers that is relatively new. By spring you may have forgotten what it is. I like those narrow white plastic labels. Not to look at, but to do a job. I use a No. 2 pencil or a special crayon to write the name, and then I push the label deep into the soil so that only a smidge is showing. If I can’t come up with a name, I know where to look. Back right corner.

Outdoor flower pots need to be emptied, cleaned and put away after frost. Don’t wait until December to do this — if a pot full of wet soil freezes, it will crack. You may as well clean out the pots now rather than in the spring. And save all that potting soil. You can invigorate it in the spring by adding compost and some organic fertilizer. So fill up a trash can or a few buckets with that potting soil and re-use it.

The vegetable garden needs to be weeded, and preferably mulched with chopped up fall leaves. If, like me, you make mounded wide beds, re-shape the beds now by hoeing up some soil from the walkways. Pull dead plants and get rid of them.

If you have an asparagus patch, look to see if your plants are loaded with those little red “berries,” their seeds. If you see seeds, cut down the stems right now. Some of those seeds will settle in and start more asparagus plants — and they will fight for moisture and minerals just as weeds do.

If you have old maple trees, think about giving them some ground limestone or agricultural lime this fall. Acid rain dissolves and washes away the calcium they need. Adding some lime will increase the vigor of your trees. And remember that soil compaction is bad for tree roots. Don’t park your car near a tree you love. Sprinkling a little compost over the soil will loosen it up as earthworms move it down and microorganisms break it down. Roots go far from the trunk of trees — much farther than the “dripline” of the branches.

My last task is always to rake the leaves. I chop mine in a chipper-shredder, but you can also run over them with a lawnmower. Leaves are full of good nutrients for plants, and are much loved by night crawlers and microorganisms. Rake the leaves onto a tarp and drag them away — that’s much more efficient than packing them into a wheelbarrow. Once it has rained, the leaves will settle in and make your plants feel cozy and loved.

Reach Henry at PO Box 364, Cornish Flat, NH 03746 or by email at henry.homeyer@comcast.net. He is the author of four gardening books.

Featured photo: This harvest sickle is great for cutting back stems of flowers. Photo by Henry Homeyer.