Garden and ranch journal, Sept 20, 2011

Weather: high around 85, a bit over 3/10 of an inch of rain. Storms breaking around us here – lots of sound and fury, but not enough rain.

Plants: Peanuts keep popping up in frames where we pulled them, leftovers from that harvest. Left them for now. The first okra plants are nearing 6′ tall, the second round at 4′ now. These are to be pulled, as we’re over okra for the season.

Done: Completed weeding the garlic frames and fertilized in prep for planting. Two frames still taken up by pepper plants that seem to be enjoying the (relatively) moderated temperatures. In the rear garden, the last row of frames is completely weeded. Sowed three types of shelling peas and replaced the dud green bush beans with new seed. Realigned the drip irrigation that was out of place from the pulling of the black eyed peas.

The next round of antivampire planting

The new seed garlic has arrived – all 71 pounds of it.

This year, as last year, the seed garlic is from Big John’s Garlic. The bulbs this year are much larger than last year’s.

Our seed stock this year is Chesnok Red, Inchelium Red, Metechi, and Lorz Italian. I had thought I’d not ordered the latter, but apparently I did, as five pounds of it is in the boxes. By far the most we will be planting are the first two, at 30 pounds each. I’ll leave it to the math majors to figure out how many pounds of Metechi that means we have.

This is also a lot more garlic than we planted last year, so should be interesting to see how many frames it takes to devote to getting it all out. If next year cooperates and it doesn’t go from mid-70s to near 100 in the span of a week, our harvest should stay on track and give us enough goodly sized bulbs that we can save the largest bulbs for replanting next fall. Not that I mind ordering from Big John’s, but it takes an awful lot of garlic to keep us supplied here between what we use and what we provide to family, so we do need a decent amount of seed stock over and above what we will consume.