Community Garden

This weekend we became part of a community garden in our small town. Our friends, Rachael & Nate, are hosting it on their couple acres in Dalton Gardens. There are 5 families involved and we are all planning on sharing the work and the produce.

Yesterday Kyle & Nate rototilled the soil and hauled in horse manure for fertilizer. We are going to let the manure soak into the soil over the winter. Then in the spring we will till the soil again to mix in the manure. Manure is the BEST FERTILIZER EVER!

Here is the garden space with ample deer fencing.

Kyle rototilling the hard ground.

Nate shoveling manure into the freshly tilled garden space.

We planted our garlic crop yesterday, too! Now is the time to plant garlic.

See my post last year about fall planting.

I picked up three different varieties from Kyle's grandpa and the farmer's market.

While the guys made trips with manure, the ladies made thai food and shared delicious wine inside. See our thai recipes here!

Harvesting & Planting Garlic

This year we harvested about 80-100 heads of garlic from our garden. We aren't sure of the variety but I think it's Kilarney Red. I will use all of that garlic for cooking during the next year so we decided to plant a larger crop this year...over 200 heads.

We harvested our garlic crop in mid August. We should have planted our new crop for next year toward the end of August so it could form roots and sprout a little bit before the snow. We just planted our crop last night. The cloves will start to form roots over the winter and in the spring will sprout like tulip bulbs. It grows all summer in the garden and is a crop that requires almost no maintenance. You can plant your crop up until the first snow and if you forget or don't have time this fall you can still plant the cloves in early spring. You will just yield smaller sized heads when you harvest.

Here's some photos of our harvest and planting.

These are garlic scapes. They are the top part of the plant. Usually you can cut them off when they are still tender and green and use them for cooking or to make Garlic Scape Pesto. We let ours dry on the stalk but I still use them in cooking. They are like a small bulb of garlic. You can plant these but they will yield much smaller heads of garlic. They are much harder than a regular clove of garlic but have the same flavor!

It's mid to end September and we just planted our crop for next year.

We saved the largest heads from this year's harvest to plant.

You break up each head into individual cloves.

You plant each clove like a tulip bulb with the pointy tip facing up.

You plant the cloves in a hole about 4-6 inches deep so the tip of the clove is 1-2 inches below the soil.

You can plant them about 6-8 inches apart in rows.