Garlic and Gladiolas

I finished planting my garlic yesterday. Yes, common tradition is that you plant your garlic on or around Columbus Day. This will be my third attempt at growing the plant, and I think I will finally be successful.

For the first attempt, I assumed garlic was like many other plants, and you put the cloves in the ground in the spring. Boy, that was the wrong move. For the second attempt, I planted the garlic in January. That was still too late in the year to result in sizable cloves, though at least I did get cloves of some kind.

So, I figure the third time is the charm. I planted four rows of Oregon Blue Softneck from Hood River Garlic. It may come as a surprise, but they're an organic garlic farm in Hood River, Oregon. I planted four rows of Elephant Garlic, with about 1/3 of the seed cloves being the undersized and undifferentiated bulbs from my second attempt last year and the other 2/3 being from some seed cloves I picked up during the Farm Day trip to Fall City Farms.

I amended the bed with blood meal, fish meal and gypsum. Why gypsum? Well, the blossom rot that occurred in some of the tomatoes I planted in the plot indicated that the soil was deficient in calcium. Gypsum will help to provide calcium without changing the pH of the soil.

I also dug up my gladiolas. In the windstorm. Yes, I'm that dedicated. Actually, the wind was kind of nice, when it wasn't whipping up clouds of dust and blowing them in my face. I won't be planting these gladiolas again, since their growing cycle doesn't really work with the rest of my landscaping plan. Too bad though. Apparently I'm good at growing the buggers. The bulbs (or is it a corm?) came out HUGE.