Tag: Gardening

2017 Garlic Harvest

Growing Garlic in the South

Our garlic year began early last October when we planted 48 cloves of Italian Loiacono, a soft neck variety and 24 cloves of Spanish Roja, a hard neck. These cloves all came from bulbs we had set aside to save from the 2016 harvest. We try to select the biggest and best looking bulbs to save for planting the next year’s crop.

The soft neck garlic is the most common variety found in grocery stores. It is the better keeper although it makes smaller heads. Each head has more but smaller cloves. The hard neck variety is better in colder climates due to deeper roots. It has fewer cloves in each head but the cloves are larger. The poorer keeper of the two varieties, we will use the Spanish Roja first.

We planted the individual cloves in early October into a 4 foot by 8 foot bed and covered them with about four inches of crushed leaves that we had collected with our lawnmower’s grass bag. The garlic sprouts will push right up through the crushed leaves but it will stifle most weeds.

Here in Alabama by the end of November the sprouts will be 6 to 8 inches tall and growth slows as the weather cools. In February, they will start growing again and by the last half of May are ready to be pulled. This year we started pulling them on May 21.

After pulling the plants we place them on screens out of the sun to dry. The drying will take about a month.

When the plants have dried we cut off the tops and the roots. We use a small scrub brush to remove the dirt from the root end of each bulb. This is when we decide whether a head is good enough to keep or if it is too small or damaged or for some other reason not worth using. Such discards will go into the compost pile. Now is when we set aside the heads we will use for planting in the Fall.

We finished with 43 heads of Italian Loiacono and 18 heads of Spanish Roja .

Here is the result of our 2017 harvest.

In colder climates, garlic is planted in the spring and harvested in late summer or fall. If you would like information on gardening in the north, I recommend Rural Revolution, This is one of our favorite blogs covering gardening and homesteading with archives and links covering a multidude of topics.

 

Growing Tomatoes in the South

Tomatoes go tent-camping

Last year we had serious problems with our tomato crop. The first tomatoes were nearly all destroyed by stink bugs and a sneak attack by tomato hornworms. We tried an experiment and managed to coax four of our not-so-determinate Rio Grande plum tomatoes into producing a second late crop. When the weather started threatening frost, we picked everything that looked like it was starting to change color and got quite a few to ripen indoors. They were not quite as good as vine-ripened but better than store-bought.

Our experiment was in buying a cot-sized mosquito net tent. This year we decided to grow 6 tomato plants split into two 4 by 8 foot beds and to cover each bed with mosquito netting. We grew Rio Grande tomatoes from seed since they had done better than our purchased Roma plants the year before. The tents let in much more sunlight than the picture makes it appear, especially down here in Alabama where sunscald can be a problem. The stink bugs we have spotted have all been crawling around on the outside of the netting and I only found two hornworms, probably from eggs laid before we got the netting up. We have picked over 20 pounds of tomatoes so far. The tomatoes are sharing space with 4 green peppers which are planted on the south side of the tomatoes. Both tomatoes and peppers can produce fruit with only the wind and an occasional shaking to spread pollen so the net does not affect the plant’s ability to set fruit.

We like to put up our tomatoes as frozen sauce. They could be canned and we have done so but for now we put them up in the freezer. For the first batch we put ten pounds of washed tomatoes through our Squeezo Strainer to take care of the seeds and peels. The Squeezo is over 35 years old but we can still find parts. So far only the rubber seal for the screen has needed to be replaced. The pulp came out nicely thick this year and two hours of simmering brought it down to a good consistency. We do not try to produce tomato paste. The time needed to produce a thick enough sauce can vary widely.

Our ten pounds of tomatoes produced four 20 ounce freezer jars of sauce. We use them in making spaghetti sauce and chili. We prefer the flavor we get from using our own frozen sauce.