This was the New Herb garden when I pulled the shades up on Friday morning.
I wasn’t moving very fast on Friday morning and didn’t have the kitchen cleaned up or gotten dressed when my helper friend arrived. I worked on those 2 things while he did his usual chores and vacuumed the downstairs.
Then we hauled the poor leeks out of the cold pantry and tried to save what we could of them. They’d been in there for 2 weeks since they were harvested.
We got enough for 3 recipes. By then it had warmed up some outside and we went out to the Big garden. He wanted to take the remaining Walla onions, still ok after 3 hard frosts, to make French onion soup. So we got those up first.
Then we laid out the first row for planting garlic. He started making the holes, but we quickly discovered that row was running down the previous year’s walkway. So he got the broadfork and loosened the soil and things went much quicker when he resumed making holes.
I followed behind planting the garlic after putting a tablespoon of BulbTone in each hole. I had just finished the first row when my general helper arrived and shortly after that my helper friend had to go, having brought over most of the hay bales.
My general helper took several of these photos on my camera, so there are several of me. Here I am mulching the first row. She had put down leaves from the bales behind the row and I did the bunches between the bulbs.
The markers tell us exactly where each bulb is so we don’t cover them with a leaf of hay or too thick bundles. They'd have a hard time coming up in either case.
Still working on the first row
The second row landed in a walkway also so I had to broadfork it before my helper could dig holes. We space them 6” apart and they are planted 6” deep.
Still planting the 2nd row
I had to broadfork the 3rd row and she had started blisters from the planter, so I did most of the 3rd row holes and she planted the bulbs. We both finished the mulching but needed 1 more bale to finish well. She used lots of the old hay on the end section instead. So the garlic was done! I couldn’t believe we got it all in on one day, with time left over.
It had gotten relatively warm and we had a half an hour left so we dragged out the squash boxes and scrubbed the dried on squash off.
They were left on the front walk in the sun to dry. I’ll get my son to carry them to the root cellar on Saturday.
Saturday I have to make a dump run with my tenant. Then he and I will be working in the root cellar laying out the ventilation system. Hopefully by the end of Sunday we will be able to move the squash into the boxes.
That will mean that in addition to trying to clean out flowerbeds, weed the New Herb garden, and other autumn chores, I hopefully will be starting to get a functioning root cellar and can start cleaning out the old one.