A Farmer and His Garlic

As part of his annual crop rotation scheme, Leigh Hauter over the years had planted garlic just about everywhere he could on his farm except for this strip of land on the slope just below his greenhouse.

The previous owners of Bull Run Farm had not done much in the way of erosion control. "There was very little topsoil left on that slope," he said. So he spent at least five years building the soil again with applications of compost made from horse manure and straw and the droppings from his chickens.

This year, Leigh and his farmhand disagreed over whether the soil was ready for garlic. Leigh said no, the farmhand said yes. "I was never really happy with what had been growing up there," Leigh said. "I didn't want to risk putting my garlic all in one place where it wouldn't do well." Eventually, though, the farmhand prevailed. Garlic it would be.

Leigh prefers a German porcelain variety of hardneck garlic. "It's done better for me, and it makes a larger bulb," he says.

Garlic is divided into two types: hardneck and softneck. They are both grown exactly the same. But the hardneck has a determinate number of cloves (sometimes as few as four, but large) and produces a "scape," a stalk from which a seed head grows. The scapes--tasting of garlic and delicious as food--are harvested before the seed head forms. Softneck garlic, meanwhile, is the kind most often found in stores with an indeterminate number of cloves--often layers of them--as well as a thicker skin. Because of its thicker skin, softneck garlic stores longer.

Garlic typically is planted in fall, then overwinters in the ground. Around August, Leigh orders 400 pounds of bulbs from a commercial grower in New York State. These will produce about 12,000 plants, resulting in 12,000 bulbs to be distributed to Leigh's 500 CSA subscribers.

First Leigh tilled the soil on the slope, adding some more compost. Then they planted the cloves--pointy end up--using a mechanical device pulled along behind his tractor. Two people ride on the device feeding cloves of garlic into a wheel that inserts the garlic about three inches below the soil surface, several inches apart, then covers them over. As long as you're driving the tractor straight, the method will create neat rows of garlic.

The final step is to cover the garlic with a thick mulch.

Garlic doesn't like competition from weeds. The mulch keeps weeds down as well as retaining moisture in the soil. Leigh uses hay from one of his neighbors who raises hay along with beef cattle. In exchange for selling some of the beef to his CSA subscribers, Leigh gets whatever hay hasn't been sold at the end of the season--typically 50 to 75 bails of it. The garlic field is covered over with a layer of hay about six inches thick, enough to block any sunlight that might reach the soil. "If the weed seeds don't get light, they can't grow," says Leigh.

The garlic, however, has no problem pushing its way through the hay after it sprouts. By spring the unmistakable garlic leaves--slender and pointy--are already several inches long. Leigh won't need to water the garlic much at all. "Even that drought we had a couple of years ago when I was worried about the garlic, it did okay." Nor will he be adding any additional fertilizer. Garlic likes lots of organic matter. But you don't want to feed it too much or you'll get too much foliage and not enough bulb.

When the scapes come up, sometime in June, they'll be cut and sent to subscribers as a treat in they're CSA boxes. Cutting the scapes also redirects the plants' energy toward making bigger bulgs. They'll be harvested when about two-thirds of the leaves have turned brown, usually around the end of June.

Mulching Garlic

I like to mulch with straw. Straw gives the garden a natty look, like the gardener really knows what he's doing. Ha! And really I should have mulched my garlic beds when I planted them last fall. But I haven't been particularly thrilled with straw mulch around garlic. It seems like the weeds always manage to find a place to grow through the straw. So this year looking at the same issue again I thought I'd try to make the straw thicker by chopping it up. This has the added advantage of making the mulch easier to lay around the garlic leaves--if you waited until spring to mulch as I did.

Here's my chopper: the trusty leaf pulverizer. It's really just a weed whacker (line trimmer) in a can, a small motor turning two lengths of plastic line at great speed. Like a food processor, you just drop your vegetable matter--usually leaves in the fall, straw at the moment--from the top. The Whirring plastic line chops it to pieces and it all falls conveniently into the trash can underneath. I always seem to have at least one pile of rotting straw somewhere in the garden, usually last year's mulch.

The trash can practically carries itself to the garlic bed, where I spend an hour or so arranging the chopped straw around the plants, about two inches thick. I like the idea of foraging for mulch on site, rather than buying something in a plastic bag from the garden center. In the past I tried mixing chopped leaves and shredded newspaper together for mulch. But the newspaper liked to blow around too much in the wind. Now I'm thinking the straw could easily be stretched by mixing in some of the shredded leaves I've been saving from last fall. The first job of mulch is to hold moisture in the soil. But it also does a good job of suppressing weeds, and garlic doesn't care much for weeds.

How do you like to mulch your garlic?

Tomatoes in Trenches

A combination of factors resulted in lanky tomato plants this year. It's hard to provide enough sun for the young plants through a window. Ours is east-facing, so they get a blast of sunlight in the morning, then reflected light for part of the afternoon.

This year, though, the weather has been unusually cool and rainy, so the plants have spent more time indoors. Straining to get more sun, they grow taller and spindlier. Now that planting time has finally arrived, I've decided to try a different technique for transplanting them into the garden. Instead of digging a deeper hole to accommodate the taller tomato plants, I'll be planting them in trenches.


I dig a hole about 18 inches long and 8 inches deep. I've placed a plant, still in its pot, inside the hole to give an idea of scale.

Next, add plenty of compost to the trench. The idea is to create a kind of earthen ramp inside the hole, where it's plenty deep at one end to hold the root ball, then grows increasingly shallower toward the leafy end of the plant.

Lay the tomato plant inside the trench so that the topmost leaves have several inches of clearance from the soil surface. Tomatoes have the admirable ability to form roots all along their stems. Covering most of the stem with soil will result in lots of roots.

Cover the length of the plant with a mix of soil and compost, carefully bending the leafy end up and clear of the trench. Tamp the soil down around the plant to eliminate any air pockets. Soak the area with water.

The final step is to mulch around the tomato plant. I like straw. I like the natty look of straw in the garden. I like the fresh farm aroma. This year I'm trying the mulching method Charles H. Wilber describes in his book, How to Grow World Record Tomatoes. Wilber holds the Guiness record for tomato production relying on compost, lots of space between his tomato plants and straw mulch. He's grown plants almost 30 feet high.

Wilber cuts blocks from straw bales and lays them tight one against the other around the tomato plants. A thick layer of mulch holds moisture in the soil and suppresses weeds. Wilber recommends partially rotted straw to help feed the tomatoes.

I don't have any partially rotted bales of straw on hand. I bought two new bales from the farm supply on a trip to Annapolis. I used my fork spade to cut blocks about two inches thick from the end of a bale, and arranged the blocks around the plants in a square. The straw blocks make a tidy garden bed, and the only thing left to do is install the cages I made last year from concrete reinforcing wire.