Our garden is entering a bit of a pause in production. The greens have bolted and the peas are nearly spent, and the cucumbers, tomatoes, and summer squash are still on their way. Mid-July did provide one quick burst of produce, as we harvested our garlic and onions.
Our garlic was grown in its own raised bed, next to a bed of asparagus. The bed was created using pine logs from some trees we took down near the house, and filled with compost. Last fall, Maggie bought several varieties of garlic at the Viroqua farmers market, instead of from a seed catalogue. We planted the individual cloves in early November. Their green spikes were the first plants we saw in the garden, poking up in early March.
The garlic provided us with entertainment as the season wore on. We were astonished at how quickly they grew, even in the absence of rain, and we admired the curly scapes in June. The leaf tips began to brown in mid- to late June. Since the heads form below ground, timing the harvest can be tricky. Fortunately, there was a speaker on garlic at this year's Wisconsin Garden Expo. He grows garlic in Cambridge, and said he typically harvests garlic around July 15. He suggested digging soil away from a couple of heads - if the head looks like an onion it is not ready to pick, but if you can see the lumps of individual cloves, you can harvest. If you wait too long, the heads will split, which the speaker said would shorten its shelf life.
The handful of softneck garlic we had planted started to wilt to the ground the first week of July. Maggie picked them, and they looked like perfect heads of garlic. She gradually picked the hardneck garlic the second week of July, and we pulled the rest this weekend. We ended up with over 100 beautiful heads of garlic. They are spread out across a patio table and the bed of our trailer to cure and dry.
The speaker for the garlic talk indicated he replants his garlic beds with bush beans, so we are trying the same thing. We bough some Jade Bush Bean seeds at Oak Shade Nursery in the spring. With the last of the garlic out, I raked the weeds out of the bed, and sowed our bean seeds. In the meantime, we will go through the garlic heads and set the best ones aside. Come October, we will break them up, plant the cloves, and start the process again.
We also harvested our onions this weekend. We had planted onion sets around the edges of our raised beds in an effort to squeeze in more plants. They showed a lot of promise early in the season, but were then overgrown by the other plants. The result was smaller onions than last year. Next year, the sets will get their own bed. Just like the garlic.
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