by Leslie Cox; Saturday; January 20, 2018

Rain. Wind. Rain and wind. Ugh. A whopping 7 inches (177 mm) of rain since last Saturday. We had a wind warning for two days which drove the rain sideways. Not pleasant.

None of this nastiness was conducive to venturing into the garden, I must say. Made a few trips to the compost bins with kitchen waste. Stopped beside the pond on one return trip to the house to see if I could spot any of our fish. One orange one stood out. There may have been one or two black ones nearby but they were invisible in the depth of the pond, especially with the rain disturbing the water’s surface.

Took a peek at the garlic bed. Nothing sprouting up yet. Drat. Two gardeners I know have proclaimed theirs are poking up an inch out of the ground. Sure hope mine start something soon. After losing most of our garlic crop to botrytis neck rot in July 2016 and not harvesting a great crop in 2017, the cloves we planted back in September is the start of our new seed stock. I hope.

I wrote about the July 2016 garlic harvest at that time. A direct result of not practicing crop rotation. (John and I had had a discussion about this…I wanted to move the garlic each season, he didn’t. Now we go by my rules.) Read about botrytis neck rot here and here and here.

Unfortunately, due to a health issue and horrible fall weather in 2016, we did not get our garlic planted until sometime in February. (Forgot to write down the date! Drat!)

Won’t ever plant garlic so late again. None of our bulbs developed individual cloves. Just one big round bulb. Mind you, the flavour is still really good. But then, not having individual cloves meant we did not have any seed stock for fall planting.

So…we bought new stock. And now we are really hoping to harvest some garlic in July. If only it will sprout!