Uncovering Garlic

A record-breaking warm day today (70 degrees here!) meant that I could get outside to remove all the leaf mulch from the garlic and perennial border. The leaves from our fall clean up were held down with some extra netting, which itself was held down by various rocks and brick offcuts. This worked remarkably well, and everything stayed in place throughout the winter.

It was also effective. I scooped up the leaves to reveal moist, black earth and garlic shoots that look like they suffered almost no dieback from the cold. In most cases here we're looking at last year's leaves instead of new shoots:

Just about every single one has survived. It looks like there might be a little loss in the center of that square that caps off the "C," but there may be hope for new shoots. The "Early Italian" variety in the center seems to have done slightly less well based on size and condition, but we'll see how it does as it grows.

The problem with the leaf-and-netting mulching system is that whenever I try to do anything with it, it's always another ridiculously windy day. Today the gusts were getting stronger throughout the afternoon, until by the time the sun was starting to set, the gusts were up to 40 mph. It's not easy to transport leaves in the wheelbarrow from the beds to the compost pile in that kind of wind, much less to fold up the netting to put it away. By the end of the afternoon in the perennial border, I was literally just tossing handfuls of leaves in the air and letting them blow away instead of trying to collect them. This was actually kind of effective — Nature's vacuum cleaner.

Anyway, the other thing I did today was turn the soil in a bed near the garlic. This is one of the earlier beds we filled with dirt, so it has had more time to re-grow weeds. There is a little accidental cover crop of some low-growing weed all over:

There's no way I want to deal with the kind of weed issue we had last year, so I turned these back into the earth. Above you can see where I started down the center of the row, and below is the finished product:

I'm not sure how much nutrition those weeds will actually add to the soil, but it can't hurt, and turning the loose, soft soil was way easier than getting on my knees to hand-pull that many weeds. There were also some of that same weed (whatever it is) in the "C" where we will add onions and leeks to the garlic that is already there, so I went ahead and turned that whole bed as well. A quick raking in of compost should be all it needs when we are ready to set out those seedlings in a few more weeks:

That good, black dirt is as pretty as any flower.