Today was a “must plant” garlic day. The weather is forecast for a turn to the very wet and cold and I’m not sure it would dry out before November. The last few weekend’s “free time” has been spent scraping and painting the house.
This year we are working with another farmer who sells garlic to Wheatsfield Co-op in Ames and he anticipates a much larger demand for garlic after the co-op moves into a much larger building next year. We bought some of the garlic that he markets and we will grow it and he will market it. It’s a tiny conenction in a local food network as a number of other farmers are participating in this informal arrangement.
The first job is to remove all the cloves from the garlic.
The second job is to recruit some help to plant the garlic.
The tractor is priceless in making the trenches to plant the garlic – digging the trenches used to be backbreaking work before. Here the kids get down to planting. I’ll mulch the rows sometime in the next few weeks.