We are actually a couple of weeks behind on these. Comes of being too busy.
Photography brought to you by Ellie-Belle!
We tried something new this time. Instead of planting the seeds in dry potting soil and then watering them in, we started by soaking the potting soil in water, before putting it in the pots.
It worked quite well. What we have noticed is that when you pack the pots with dry soil it takes quite a while for the water to soak down into it. Soaking all the soil in water before potting was much quicker.
After potting the cabbages and brussels sprouts we went out to the garden to pull the last of the garlic.
Ellie takes this job very seriously.
Sort of seriously.
Okay, not seriously at all.
We also had our eight stalks of elephant garlic, which isn’t really a garlic at all, but more like a leek. Around the base of each of the bulbs we found 4-6 corns which function somewhat like seeds. We will plant those later on in the fall, after we take the squash and tomatoes out. Of note, the corns do not produce full heads with multiple cloves, but rather a non-flowering stalk with a single large clove in their first year, and then the typical flowering stalk with multi-cloved head in the second year. For this reason I think we will plant them among the wood chips in the orchard around some of the trees, since they also (allegedly) deter pests.
Once the garlic was out we raked out the row and seeded it with rutabagas, parsnips and two varieties of carrots. The parsnips will be ready sometime in October or November, just in time for soup weather.
Look! I’m a unicorn!
And now we irrigate those seeds in. If you look closely you’ll see that Miss Unicorn left her hoodie behind under the raspberries and it is now quite soaked.
Third and final haul of garlic for the summer.
Oh I hope we have enough garlic to last through the winter!
We will be saving the largest cloves for planting in the fall, so hopefully over the next few years we will select for larger and larger garlic heads.
Little Farm in the Big City 