Sunday, June 12, 2011

Garlic got planted finally!

Jeff's Birthday even!

Hooray for a patch of fine weather at last, I've had all my garlic cloves peeled and ready to plant for two weeks already but it has been so wet that it would have been foolhardy to put them into the soil before now. I think they would have rotted for sure.

I cut down both chili plants and the last capsicum and have left about 10 inches of stump to overwinter, t'will be interesting to see how that goes. This is the harvest, a good lot of green chillies for the nice fresh Thai curries.[ [edit one year later] the stumps of chilli and capsicum looked like dead sticks at the end of winter so that was not a go, I've also since been told it doesn't really do all that well anyway.]



I added an extra edge of wood to the garlic patch to be able to raise the soil so that stuff can be planted quite close to the edge. The soil had already recieved a good dressing of blood and bone a week or two ago so it was a matter of laying out a lattice of sticks to set out the distance between cloves. I have a bamboo stick with a bit of tape 13 cm from the end to measure the distance between the sticks. The same bamboo also has tape at 6 cm, the depth to plant the clove. I use the stick to poke a nice neat hole 6 cm deep in the center of the squares of lattice of sticks, pop the best and fattest cloves into the bottom of the holes and gently firm over, stand clear for a wonderful crop of garlic (in six months). I managed to squeeze in 82 fat cloves. :)

Heres a collage of the garlic bed (click for a big one)

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