Zombie Garlic and Other Spring Surprises!

In my homestead-style gardening class at the local community college, we talk a lot about resilient plantings for your food garden. Garlic is at the top of the list!

Garlic that will not die!

A couple of years ago, one April day, my husband John stuck some shriveled garlic cloves into a neglected bed. I’m sure the soil had very little fertility—rife with weeds, the bed hadn’t had any compost on it for two or three years. 

Predictably, the garlic didn’t get very tall and the heads didn’t develop. We wrote it off as an experiment and moved on. 

At one point, I wanted to use the bed for something else. To smother the garlic I first laid a sheet of steel roofing over it, and after pulling up the sheet, set a layer of thick cardboard over the bed.

This garlic, you understand, was completely covered up for months on end.

Catching up on garden tasks this week after a freeze, I discovered the garlic is happily sprouting! The sprouts aren’t at all sturdy, and I’m sure the roots won’t really develop proper heads. But who knows…I’ve only got 4 garlic heads from last summer left in the pantry, so I just might use the undersized roots of this never-say-die garlic to flavor soups and stews!

Meanwhile, over in my real garlic bed, they’re going great guns. A dozen or so shoots got hung up in their winter mulch, so I poked around, found the tops, and freed them from the mulch. These shoots had gotten a bit yellowed, but they greened up in two days.

Yesterday, I had my eye on a blackberry crown in a flowerbed, whose canes were over six feet long. I got out my spade fork to make short work of it—and saw some tiny green shoots among the black-eyed Susans. I poked a bit at them too, and low and behold—they were daffodils that I thought had been choked out years ago!

The round leaves on the right are the invasive black-eyed Susans

Black-eyed Susans, you understand, develop below ground into a super tough mat of roots and runners. And oh my goodness, this bed was wall-to-wall with them. What seems miraculous that these little daffodils had actually survived, enough to keep sending up shoots.

I got to work and pulled out the tough little black-eyed Susan crowns surrounding the daffodils. Once exposed, my daffodilly shoots were somewhat yellow too, but it’s amazing how resilient daffodils can be—like the garlic, these little shoots greened up in no time flat.

My hands, dealing with the wiry black-eyed Susan roots, are the worse for wear… but I have hopes the daffodils will gain enough strength to flower—if not this spring, then next!

True, you can’t eat daffodils—but their flowers are one of the first springtime plants to provide food for pollinators. 

One unwelcome discovery this week: I learned why you don’t transplant small plants in the middle of winter. Two words: soil heaving. 

This past November, we got a hard freeze just after Halloween—so I couldn’t transplant my home-grown strawberry starts into a bed until way too late. Still, I figured the starts would be fine, since I’d put several inches of mulch around the crowns. 

Interestingly, they made it through the worst of winter weather, including multiple Northeasters, and every time we got a melt, I could see they were pretty darn healthy looking. 

But then, each time it got really cold, the beds were covered with snow. Which we all know is the best winter insulation gardeners can find! 

But wait… Two weeks ago, we had yet another Northeaster—temps in the teens—and no snow. I could see from the house the strawberry plants had lost color—and looked peaked. And when it warmed up and I got a closer view, I saw to my dismay that this last thaw had heaved the strawberry plants’ root balls right out of the ground. 

I got busy right away and replanted the crowns, and added even more mulch. Fortunately, like daffodils and garlic, strawberries are resilient. Nearly every crown has already sent up a very hopeful little leaf, unfurling more each day. I’ll plan to report on their progress!

There’s the first tiny leaf, right in the center of the crown!

What Spring surprises are you finding in your garden? 

Garden Planning and Sad Spuds

A sad, scabby harvest

It’s never too soon to plan for next year’s food garden. I learned this the hard way.

In a perfect world, many months before planting season, I’ll have a general idea of what crop to plant in which bed. That means I can plan the kind of amendments a certain bed might need.

Plus it’s a great idea for rotating your beds. (You can find lots more about rotating your veggie beds in my free gardening guide, Little Farm in the Garden!) 

I keep things easy in terms of rotation with a rough little map of my food garden. It probably looks like chicken scratches to anyone else, butt it shows me the planting history of my veggie beds. That way, I can plan to keep 3-4 years between crops.

As you can see, my map is due for an update!

For example, garlic is what’s called a “heavy feeder.” It needs lots of nutrients, so I try to have lots of
chopped leaves and compost on the bed by early fall, so the soil is well-nourished and ready for planting in November.

Also, when you plan ahead, you can make sure you haven’t overlooked other fall tasks. In our area, the soil is fairly acidic. It’s great for blueberries, but not for most vegetables. So in the fall, I’ve gotten into the habit of sprinkling dolomite lime on my veggie beds to “sweeten” to soil—that is, make it a bit more alkaline.

A year ago, getting beds ready for this past year’s spring planting, I had done my usual: sprinkled dolomite lime on the beds before mulching them for winter.

And that was where I went wrong: Liming all my veggie beds.

Now, potatoes like slightly acidic soil—so dolomite lime is unnecessary. What I should have done was chosen a bed last fall and simply mulched it.  

I discovered my “woulda, shoulda, coulda” when I harvested my Yukon potatoes last week. The plants had been pretty weak-looking all summer, small and pale green. The foliage had also died back many weeks before it usually does.

So when the potato foliage had been dry and brown for a couple of weeks, I grabbed my little hand fork and dug into the bed.

My harvest was, in a word, pretty awful. A half dozen barely-medium sized ones, and about 15 golf-ball size or smaller. Not even a third of my usual yield from 9 or 10 hills.

Part of that could have been from something I couldn’t prevent: the hot summer. Potatoes don’t care for a lot of heat. Also, our early summer had been very dry, just when the tubers were forming and needing extra moisture.

The most discouraging part was the terrible scab on the spuds. I went online to research and discovered scab is more prevalent in alkaline soil. Slightly acidic soil inhibits it. So that was on me: I’d planted my seed potatoes in a limed bed.

Scab doesn’t really affect the taste—I baked the least scabby potato last night and it was fine. But these spuds are so scabby I’ll have to cut away half of each one.

So this month, I’m going to be all about planning! I’ve already picked out my fall-planted garlic bed, and I have lots of leaves and compost ready for top-dressing. And when the fall rains start, I’ll be doing my dolomite lime sprinkle on it too.

I’ve also noticed how vigorous some of my crops are this summer: for example, a really robust bunch of cucumber plants. Last year, I’d planted onions there, and had really piled on the dried leaves both during the growing season and for overwintering. So you can be sure I’ll be top-dressing my beds with as much organic matter as I can.

I’ve also picked out next spring’s Yukon Gold tater bed. Definitely no lime there! I’m also trying something new for my Yukons…

Those dots are my pea seeds, and the net is ready!

I saved a bunch of pea seeds from last year’s harvest. As an experiment, I’ve planted them in next spring's potato bed to add nutrients to the soil. You can bet I'll be protecting the bed to keep the towhees from plucking all my seeds out!

The plants will hardly be a few inches high by the time our first frost hits in mid-October—at which point they’ll give up the ghost.

But I’ll just gently till the dead plants into the soil and see what happens next year—after all, the fun part of gardening experiments is that  you’ll always learn something!