Garlic fall 2020 (3)

I had decided that given an opportunity, I might add to the garlic patch at the back of the house,¹⁾I want to keep the triangle south of our driveway for other things such as sweet potatoes and tomatoes. but with one thing or another (mainly work!) I didn’t get around to it until yesterday!!

Prepraring the area occurred in three steps:

1. I put some cardboard on the proposed extension area, i.e., an area roughly equal in size to what was already there and adjacent and to the south of it. Some friends of ours had suggested this as a way to keep down the invasion of grass and weeds. It can’t hurt, so why not.
2. Our next door neighbour Matt had kindly dropped off some manure into the pile which he has for me in the corner of his property adjoining the northeast corner of our lot some time back, so I fetched a tractor-bucket load of it and dumped on the cardboard, then evened it out with a rake.
3. Finally, I then got a bucket-load of topsoil from the pile I had left from excavating the foundation for my steel shed, and put that on top and smoothed it out as well.

With the area prepared, I planted two more east/west rows, again at 18″ intervals. Here’s what I planted:

• In the first row (heading south),
  • 5 cloves of Metechi at the west end, and
  • 4 cloves of Irkutsk at the east end;
• In the second row (i.e., the southernmost one),
  • 2 cloves of Irkutsk at the west end, and
  • 6 cloves of Portugal #1.

I planted all of those varieties in the triangle plot, but I’m learning to treat garlic as I would a stock portfolio (if I were richer than I am)—diversify!²⁾This helps to protect the ‘investment’ in the event that there is a local pest infestation or the climatic conditions are better in one spot than the other (our lot is heavily treed so that’s a distinct possibility here).