Garlic Harvest and Other Things

We started harvesting our garlic this past weekend. It feels late this year, compared to the last two years, when we harvested over the 4th of July holiday. Those were early years, this year is pretty much on time. We harvested the Inchelium Red and Chesnok Red garlic, and still have the Nootka Rose to go. The harvest was a bit disappointing, because the heads were very small. I am not even going to post a picture of them. We had quite a bad case of rust in the garlic and while the rust doesn’t damage the cloves themselves, it does stunt the plants, often resulting in smaller heads. Oh well, you win some, you lose some. This will not be the year of the garlic. Maybe it will be the year of the potato, because our plants are looking better than ever. I think we’ll take a peek under the dirt this weekend and see how the spuds are sizing up.

In other activity this week, we got the second round of sweet corn planted, along with the leeks and a second planting of summer squash/zucchini. I am trying out a new variety of sweet corn, called Double Red, from Adaptive Seeds. Red sweet corn! I am anxious to see how it will turn out and how it will taste. I’ve had some melons waiting to be planted in a hoop house, and I cleared out some space for them in the new hoop house. The zucchini we had in there became monsters. They were hard to harvest from and had grown over everything around them. The field zucchini are producing well now, so it was time to take them out and put in the melons. I hope they will have enough time to mature…if the summer stays warm and the fall is nice, they could just make it. Being in the hoop house will definitely help! One of the things that slows down growth is cold temperatures at night. We often have nights in the 40s during the summer. You’d be amazed at how much more plants will grow, and fruits mature, at night if the temperatures are in the 50s and even more if they stay in the 60s. It can be impressive. Keep your fingers crossed for some warm nights, a long fall and melons!