Garlic might be one of the most potent natural performance enhancers right behind beets.
Garlic is well known to improve your health in so many different ways.
Garlic will help you to lose weight, it helps with digestion, increases your energy level, garlic is an antifungal, antibacterial, and antiviral, garlic will help to prevent heart attacks and strokes, it also improves the health of your skin and hair, and it's an antioxidant.
What's not to like about garlic.
This year we not only planted cloves from our own garlic bulbs we also purchased two other types of garlic for planting, Conventional California Late White and Organic Inchelium Red.
The garlic in the middle of this picture is ours. It is hard neck garlic. The garlic we purchased is soft neck garlic, and it will store for a longer period of time.
Garlic will also help you to lower your blood pressure.
For the past five years, I've been taking medication to lower my blood pressure, but not for the past six months. 😁
I have been taking BP Complete 120. It is a vitamin supplement that is made up of garlic, grape seed extract, and celery seed extract.
The results have been astonishing!
Talk about scary, here are some facts about high blood pressure. Needless to say, the problem is out of control. A good diet, along with exercise will help you to avoid becoming a casualty of this silent killer!
Having hypertension puts you at risk for heart disease and stroke, which are leading causes of death in the United States.2
In 2018, nearly half a million deaths in the United States included hypertension as a primary or contributing cause.2
Nearly half of adults in the United States (108 million, or 45%) have hypertension defined as a systolic blood pressure ≥ 130 mm Hg or a diastolic blood pressure ≥ 80 mm Hg or are taking medication for hypertension.3
Only about 1 in 4 adults (24%) with hypertension have their condition under control.3
About half of adults (45%) with uncontrolled hypertension have a blood pressure of 140/90 mm Hg or higher. This includes 37 million U.S. adults. 3
About 30 million adults who are recommended to take medication may need it to be prescribed and to start taking it. Almost two out of three of this group (19 million) have a blood pressure of 140/90 mm Hg or higher.3
High blood pressure was a primary or contributing cause of death for more than 494,873 people in the United States in 2018.2
High blood pressure costs the United States about $131 billion each year, averaged over 12 years from 2003 to 2014.4
https://www.cdc.gov/bloodpressure/facts.htm
Enough with the scary part and my personal journey to bring my blood pressure under control.
This is the plot of garlic from this year's garden.
For a plot this size, we harvested many garlic bulbs, but plan on tripling the number of bulbs we get next year.
One of the reasons we will be growing more garlic in the future is because this year we made Garlic Dill Pickles. This was a first for us. We canned 15 quarts of pickles and the recipe calls for a lot of garlic. We weren't sure how they would turn out. With just these two mason jars left out of the 15, I would say they turned out pretty good.
Garlic cloves should never be planted in the same bed one year after the next. Last year we planted peas in this area.
This bed is about 25 feet long, and it is wide enough to put in two rows of garlic cloves.
Garlic can be planted 6 inches apart, and using an old broom handle made it very easy to make the holes. The depth of each hole should be about 4 inches deep.
When placing the clove in the hole, the pointed side goes up.
Looked who showed up, 
Wanting enough garlic to last the year, we also needed to take over a small portion of the potato bed.
After all of the cloves were planted, a little tamping was required.
I always scratch my head when someone throws away a perfectly good tool just because the handle is broken. That's an easy fix, just grab a tree branch and make it work.
The last step is to cover the newly planted garlic cloves with lots of hay. They will be bedded down for the winter. The cold weather we get in UpState NY dictates that we plant our garlic in the middle of October. Doing this will allow the rooting system to develop over the winter, producing large bulbs by the middle of August.
With two new beds planted, we should have enough garlic to make as many pickles as we can eat. 😍
Be healthy and be happy!