Before I write anything else, I have to ask for your indulgence if this post seems weird or misspelled or has a ton of grammatical errors. A bee stung me yesterday as I was harvesting the year’s garlic, and it was on my head, stuck in my hair, and it took a while to get the stinger out, and therefore I had a giant reaction and just barely avoided going to the hospital, and the entire left side of my face is completely swollen and my left eye is swollen shut. So! I’m having some vision issues. And some headache issues. However, I’m confident that in a couple of days I’ll have the use of my face and eye back, good as new.
What this did mean is that I spent today with an ice pack on my face and couldn’t help Tom with this project, which looks AMAZING don’t you think? But hang on, let me back up a bit.
I didn’t intend to harvest the garlic this early, but here’s what happened: For the second year in a row, we lost our shallot crop to black (allium) aphids. This happened about a week ago; I went to take out a bunch and see how they were doing and then I saw the multitudes of aphids all over the green parts of the shallots, and then when I dug them up they were rotten. I did everything right - made sure the soil was light and fluffy before planting, interplanted with clover to bring in predatory insects, and stopped watering a month ago to dry out the crop and start the curing process. It didn’t help. Failure happens, sometimes, even when you do everything right. Even when you’re an experienced gardener. Even when you’ve had successes in the past. Farming is always a crapshoot. The good news is that we are not relying on the shallots for our yearly income, and the worst thing that will now happen is that we’ll have to buy shallots all year from the market.
However, I knew I didn’t want those aphids to hop over to the garlic and do the same thing to that crop. So, I went ahead and pulled it out a little before I wanted to. The bulbs are a nice size, but the greenery was barely starting to turn yellow, so I would have liked to leave it a bit longer. Now it needs to cure for a month before I braid it and bring it in the house.
Usually we just shove it up above the chicken coop, but I’ve decided that isn’t ideal because it sometimes gets direct sun, and often there isn’t enough air moving around the stalks. I asked Tom to build me something different on which to cure the garlic. We both did a little research on how small farms generally cure the crop. We saw lots of tables with slats - you slide the garlic in, with the head on top and the greenery falling down below. Tom did some drawing, then went into our garage rafters to see what kind of wood we had on hand, and spent a morning at my dad’s table saw and knocked together a table/rack. First he put it on sawhorses and tried it that way.
Tom wasn’t satisfied with this, because the greenery was dragging on the ground and part of the table would get morning sun. So he rigged it up so that it could hang in our garage on chains, and there The Garlic Forest will stay until the end of June. Since we are home, we will open both garage doors during the day to get a cross breeze, and the garlic should cure nicely in that warm, dry, dark space.
I’ve spent some time being mad about the shallots, which I think is my right, after all that work and time. Shallots haven’t gone right for us in several years. I think I’ll skip them next year. I’ll still plant garlic, in a different spot of course, but we’ll wait a while before trying onions again.
I know that there are some new readers here, some folks just starting out on their gardening adventures, and I want you, specifically, to know: Sometimes when you look an at established garden, it’s easy to think that the gardener has it all dialed in and everything is effortless. That’s just not the case. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or a newbie, there are always challenges. It’s ok to have frustrated feelings about failures or mistakes. The important thing is to keep going - keep trying - keep growing. You will have successes far more often than failures. And we learn from both those things. Don’t quit!
As always, I welcome your questions and input below in the comments. I respond to every person who takes the time to write to me - I so appreciate your engagement and company. And if I don’t have an answer to your question, I’m sure someone here will!
Off to ice my eye again. :) Have a good Memorial Day weekend everybody.