Planted garlic

November 27, 2011

My husband and I really believe in growing our own food. I'm even nerdy enough to actually weigh everything we harvest and I have it on a spreadsheet and it calculates how much we would have spent buying it in the grocery store so that we can see how much money we've actually saved from gardening. Cucumbers alone were $506 worth! (181 lbs times 2.79 per lb) Not that I would have ever bought that many cucumbers in one summer, but  that's how many came from our garden! Now I have around 60 quarts of pickles...I don't know how we'll eat it all, but oh well. Spaghetti squash was also a whopping $309 worth! Yep, our pantry is FULL of spaghetti squash! Anyway, our total earnings, not including the four pallets of sweet potatoes that I have to weigh still is $1,716.

So, now that it's winter and all the grass hoppers are dead, we are beginning to plant some cold-hardy vegetables. First, a picture of a dead grasshopper.

Look at the gate and see if there's anything odd about it.....

Now take a closer look...

We had a plague of these little monsters right at the end of the season

So...back to the planting of garlic....

Before I could plant the garlic, I had to "shape the bed". We have raised beds but we've noticed that over the last year, our 5 foot wide bed has shrunk to around 3 1/2 feet. The sides are eroding. So, we needed some structure on the sides and started out using rocks that we hand-collected off a mountain close to our house but only got two beds done when some rancher secured the gate that we were going in and out of with barbed wire. So, we had to go with the alternative of wood.  My husband, the great researcher that he is, found a guy who had replaced the wood seats of some bleachers with metal and was selling the wood for really cheap. We bought it and used the table saw from the farm to cut them into 6 inch wide pieces. Then we hammered some re-bar into the ground to keep them in place.

So, here's the garlic

I made a 6 X 6 grid and Omega layed the garlic on every corner that she could reach.

Orion helped separate the cloves from the bulb

Of course, this is before we pushed them down into the dirt. I wanted to make sure I had straight rows :)

When we were all done they got to throw the paper/garlic into the air like confetti!

Not sure why they wanted to stick their tongue out. In the desert we get little snow...so maybe they were pretending it was snow.