Month: May 2019

As the downpours have temporarily halted and the ground has dried sufficiently to be somewhat (!) workable, I did a bit of planting today.

White Spanish onions

First, I planted some White Spanish onions in front of the house in the spaces between the six grape tomato plants I planted the other day (and forgot to log here).

This involved a little bit of preparation to get rid of the weeds which have started to grow, followed by the distribution of a handful of onion sets which I bought the other day. There was no particular count; it was a spur-of-the-moment purchase as it’s a wet year—I’ve had no luck with onions in the past….

Yukon Gem potatoes

I had also bought 6 Yukon Gem seed potatoes and planted them in the southern part of the garlic patch.

To make sure I know where they are later, I made 18″ stakes out of rips from 2 by 6s or the like which I had lying around. In the past, I’ve always used bamboo canes, but they are very fragile and tend to break and get lost.

I’ll add a diagram in due course; I have more potatoes to plant, but this involves mounting the loader on the tractor (so that I can add some soil to the southern portion of the garlic patch, where it’s low), and I’ve no time left for that today.

Two days ago, I did a survey of the garlic patch. I was quite pleased with the results: most of the garlic I had planted last fall came up, and is growing well thanks to the rain. The main concern will be the potential for rot if the downpours continue.

Here’s a photo of my hand-written survey. North is at the bottom of the page.

Legend:

• (mostly) open circle: successfully growing plant
• stand-alone filled circle: bamboo separator
• ‘2’ means that two plants are growing rather than one
• ‘x’ means that nothing is growing there (either nothing was planted or else the clove has rotted etc.)

Garlic types are annotated,[ref]As one can see from the diagram, I have resolved the ‘Irkutsk’ confusion I alluded to in the fall; given the number of columns all told, it would appear I did in fact only plant 3 cloves of Irkutsk.[/ref] as are the occasional ‘volunteer’ plants.

The dotted circles represent patches in which I planted garlic seeds; the sprouts can be used as a kind of garlic chive.