Last week was especially stressful for us. Thankfully, I know where to get some good therapy– the dirt.
I haven’t actually planted anything myself this year- besides potatoes and tomatoes on one unusually hot spring day. The hubby is usually the man in charge of planting the garden anyhow, but between the end of pregnancy and a little nursing baby, I’ve been particularly distanced from digging on hands and knees as of late. I was very grateful for a recent opportune moment to slip away to plant some garlic.
This was a bit of an experiment, as we’ve never grown garlic before. They say to plant seed garlic, but did I do that? No. I went and planted the grocery store garlic. But it was organic and already starting to sprout, so I take that as a good sign that it just may work.
I broke the bulb into its separate cloves and dug little holes about 6″ apart with my fingers into a patch formerly used for potatoes. Then I tucked the cloves into their little earthen nests, pointy side-up, and covered them with dirt and some straw. (The straw was already there for covering the potatoes.)
A gardening friend once told us that garlic is “7-11.” Plant them in November, he said, and they should be ready by July for harvesting. It’s not quite November, but we are expecting our first real frosts in the next week or two and we wanted to get the garlic in before the ground hardened.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to tell you whether or not our non-seed garlic grew until next July, but I am able to tell you this: It was good therapy to get my hands in the dirt on a quiet, sunny autumn afternoon. I’m going to have to try to do this more often. 🙂
