On Thursday morning when I pulled up the dining room shades, I found the puddles were frozen.
And the middle pasture grass had a coat of frost on it. My general helper was coming and we’d be working inside for a while until it warmed up.
We started off with breaking the cloves from the bulbs and inspecting them for quality and size. The metal bowl was for rejects.
I already knew the garlic hadn’t done as well due to the drought as last year, because the bulb size was smaller. I was disheartened to find that even though they had appeared to cure well, they had developed disease and pests that had spread while stored. One can expect this when plants are too stressed.
Normally I only use the biggest cloves and nothing iffy. I needed 275 minimum of cloves to plant and all I got was 261 and that was including small cloves and some borderline ones. The first 2 buckets have 75 cloves each, the back one the iffy stuff.
Next we got 3 buckets of 75 markers each ready and filled 3 more buckets a third full of BulbTone. Then we found all the bulb planters and we were all set.
It had finally warmed up to almost 50F and the sun was out so we headed outside. First we brought up 10 bales of hay. The garlic needed to be very well mulched as it couldn’t be fixed once the plants came up.
Then we cleaned up the mulch and moved it to the side, finishing with raking up the loose mulch. Planters are very hard to use if there’s hay in the soil. By then it was nearly noon so we cleaned up.
I brought the truck around and left it in the driveway. This was the view up the driveway.
The house looked so pretty with the foliage around it and the deep blue autumn sky.
I rested for a couple hours and had lunch. My tenant came home from work early so I scurried around getting fires laid and ready to go. We were finally getting the pipe needed for the root cellar ventilation.
We got back just before supper time and I got some heating up, lit the fires, pulled the shades, ate, and was in bed by 7PM.
Chaos Friday has my helper friend here at 8AM. I will probably have to go out in the cold and lay out the garden with him. I don’t know if he will then start planting or want something warmer to do until he leaves at 11AM.
My general helper will arrive sometime after 10:30 and then we will start some serious garlic planting until we are sick of it in the afternoon. If we don’t finish, she is coming back late morning on Saturday and we will finish and get the mulch down then.