Right next to the enclosed garden area was a patch of thistles that I kept mowed down all summer. Apparently the last ranch caretaker had a massive high hoop house there, so I figured by that and the fact that the massive thistles I fought all summer, that the soil was pretty dang fantastic.
Another interesting tidbit of information that I gleaned, is that the ranch owner always wanted garlic, and had bought several hundred dollars of seed garlic a couple years ago during the time of a yet another ranch caretaker. This one assured them they knew how to plant garlic, and plant it the caretaker did, each bulb, whole and upside down.
Now, I have grown garlic for several years, it's something I enjoy, but I have to admit that I found that egregious waste of funds and seed garlic a bit more than my brain wanted to bear. We live in a time of almost instantaneous information generation, so I didn't get that garlic waste caper at all.
Since the ranch owner knew that I actually did know how to grow garlic, they had already went ahead and ordered quite a bit of seed. And since it is October, I spent the last two days planting it.
I usually don't plant garlic til mid October or later at home, depending on the temps, but we are supposed to drop below freezing way up here on Sunday, plus, I am getting ready to head off to Chicago for a couple weeks, so I went ahead and plunked it into the ground, individual cloves and right side up even!
It was an absolutely beautiful fall day out. Both days I worked were gorgeous. The hubs had brought over the tractor and rototiller and tilled in the dead weed matter for me, as I had covered the thistle patch with cardboard and weed barrier a month previously. Honestly, I love to no til most of the time, but for the first year I had too.
And holy nice soil! There's a touch of clay in the soil here, it's just purty!
I marked out my raised beds, shook my head at the corg who decided to snack on some of my stakes like they were corn on the cob, and got to planting. The owner had ordered so many varieties. Alberta Rose, Transylvanian, Music, Killarney Red, and my favorite, Dishonest Amish lol!
After plunking the ten pounds of seed garlic into the ground, I ran down to the barn on the four-wheeler and grabbed a couple bales of hay to mulch the cloves with. I really like having the ATV about. I never get out of hand on it at all. Nope.
The breeze off the lake along with the waves lapping the shore really made my day. Yesterday, because the hubs had to go to CDA to run his gun programs and the owners are out of state, meant that it was just me, the pups, and nature. The silence was fantastic. I also punctuated the silence with a singing and dance party courtesy of my Bluetooth speaker. It was one of the more fun garlic planting instances I have endured.
One nice thing about garlic is that you just put it to bed and it does its thing over winter. I plan on fertilizing it a bit with our very fertile lake water early next spring, but the soil, it's already glorious. Next year's raspberry canes are already over seven feet tall! Some are eight I think!
And now, now I am going to do the unthinkable it seems, take a freaking day off! I am going to go paint my toenails, do a pore cleansing mask, watch some brain rot tv and reels, and maybe, I don't know, just stare off into space. Because I can!!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's really in a need of a good de-compost cleaning iPhone.