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Garlic Planting and Winter Prep!

  • Kait
  • Oct 31, 2019
  • 4 min read

Well we managed to find an actually decent day to head up to the farm and get our garlic cloves into the ground!

I made my way up to the farm on October 20th with 250 cloves on my passenger seat, ready to hit the dirt, and met up with Ben who was busy hunting all weekend at the farm.

As I pulled in past the barley fields I saw Ben in the tractor already tilling under the garden plot, getting it ready for winter hibernation. He had picked up some straw bales from a local pig farmer to make up some bedding and we immediately started the very last harvest of the year.. our last row of frosted carrots and beets. And they were huge! Honestly you cannot beat the smell of a freshly dug carrot, even in late October!

Digging up fall carrots!

Gunner helping us dig out the new Garlic bed!

We used a bin to store these roots, along with layers of straw and brought the bin to the house in Calgary and hopefully they will make it through the winter in our garage.. fingers crossed! We simply have no room in our deep freeze for any more frozen veg! But we are hoping to test out different methods of storing root veg as we get closer to being on the farm more and growing even more food! The next big thing would be digging out our own root cellar on the farm. I am picturing it being hobbit-hole style, which would be my favourite thing.

After we dug up all our carrots with a slobbery labrador waiting patiently for his favourite orange snack to come his way, we began making up a new bed for our garlic row.

We planted 250 cloves, which was about 25% more than last year's crop, with an addition of a new variety of Creme De La Rasa, which are these HUGE red cloves, with some bulbs being comprised of only 2 or 3 gigantic cloves. I'm intrigued to see how these grow and what the taste profile is. Something interesting to try! As we only got 2 lbs, and the cloves are enormous, we only planted 27 of these, but hopefully we can grow our crop if we like the plant. We got these new garlic seeds from Twin Brothers Garlic, a farm out of Strathmore, the rest we had harvested from our crop from this year. It feels great to be able to plant seed from crop we grew. Finally closing the loop on our garden!

We decided to get a bit more organized and fitted up string to make a (somewhat) more straight row for the garlic. It was a good start anyways!

We got a whole lot done in just a few hours on a sunny Sunday in October. It started out frigid, only 4 deg in the morning, but then it finally warmed up as we dug into the ground and it got so warm that we were able to enjoy a Farmers Tan beer from Brewsters on some folding chairs in the sun! It was almost like experiencing fall in Ontario. Such a lovely afternoon with my guys. It's amazing how nice a day on the farm feels after being stuck in the city for work for almost two months. It's not like hitting a park to "get outside", it's a whole different feeling of freedom and serenity. It's a type of quiet that you just can't get surrounded by people in a city, and you don't realize how noisy it is, until you remove all of the city.

We finished up by putting all of our garlic cloves into bed for the year! And take a look at that sunshine!

We tilled up about 8 more feet more than we did last season, extending the garden further. We will see if we are able to grow anything there this coming season! Perhaps sunflowers as I was able to harvest quite a bag of seeds from my flower heads to make a little sunflower garden of my own this upcoming year.. hoping to sell some gorgeous sunflowers if the fall weather cooperates in the 2020 season! Again, such a great feeling, being able to harvest our own seed and remove the middle man again, and in turn, more than tripling my sunflower plot!

We tucked in our garlic, our 6 haskap plants, our three rhubarb transplants from last season and our 10 strawberry plants! We are hoping next season is when our fruit plants will really explode and we can finally get.. ya you guessed it.. the fruits of our labours ;). They have had a good season to really get their roots in an be established, and my mouth is already watering thinking about the rhubarb next spring!

When we leveled out our garden plot we couldn't help but think of all the options for next year, and some new vegetables to try out. We are looking forward to the break but it always is a little too long for us, and we are always itching to get rid of the snow once the excitement of the holidays wears off.

But until then, we will get super excited to hand out candy to the little trick-or-treaters tonight under the glow of our jack o' lanterns. Ben will be finishing up his hunting as we get into November, and he will be busy harvesting to fill up the rest of our freezer for the year.

Then we get excited to go exploring for our new christmas tree under the shadows of the rocky mountains in Kananaskis country and eat our holiday smoked goose, with even more home grown food than last Christmas!

Lastly, we will receive our new seed catalogues from all of our favourite companies to plan out the garden and make our orders around the new years! And then 2020 will be ready, for more adventures, planting and harvesting.

So cheers to the last two months of 2019! Hopefully there are still many celebrations and successes, fun and love with your friends and family ahead of you to wrap up what's been a very successful year for us!

Like our garlic, I hope you all stay warm this winter and we will likely be writing more in the new year with plans for the next growing season!

Cheers to you all, friends, family and farmers!

Kait


 
 
 

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