Learning About This Elephant Garlic Stuff…..
This is the second year I’ve harvested elephant garlic, the colossal cloved “fake” garlic. I call it fake because it technically isn’t true garlic; it is a member of the leek family, aka garlic’s cousin. I purchased seed stock from Groworganic.com in the fall of 2010, a single pound which only amounted to maybe 6 or 7 cloves. I saved most of the modest harvest last year for seed and as of this past weekend have around 2 dozen freshly pulled plants ready to cure.
Wagons ho!:
I’ve figured out some things, mainly that the annual harvest brings elephant garlic in 3 distinct stages of development.
In reverse order:
The third or complete stage, a fully finished head of elephant garlic with distinct and divisible cloves (ie the type you would purchase @ market). The heads below are for the most part fully developed (with the exception of the small co-joined “round” one at the very top). The second from the top was obviously ready some time back, but it will be fine since the cloves store pretty long on their own.
These will hang and dry/cure for a few weeks and then be ready to store and/or eat as needed/wanted.
The “second” or intermediate stage of elephant garlic is what is classified as a “round”. A round is a large round bulb that has yet to divide into cloves; these look like hard smooth onions when cured and are just as edible as the cloves albeit they sometimes have a stronger garlic flavor (“stronger” subjectively on the milder elephant garlic scale but barely registering on the true garlic scale.)
With rounds you have two choices; you can eat them as noted or you can replant them in the fall where they will develop into very large and healthy fully cloven heads the second year.
The “head” on the right is definitely a round; it has no neck and its top is floppy like an onion @ harvest:
Why did I have any rounds vs 100% fully developed heads? It seems that a small % of cloves take longer to develop and mature (sort of like sons, eh mother?) and a few rounds are to be expected.
The “first” stage of elephant garlic is the “corms” stage. These are the odd, hard shelled little clingers that are found in the roots of mature elephant garlic heads and they are the certain way to grow “rounds”. These can be immediately replanted (some recommend to do so with their tips nipped to pierce the hard outer shell); in their first year they will develop into single rounds. As previously noted, the rounds will become full bulbs in their second season, completing the two year cycle from corm to mature bulb.
Corms in the roots:
I collected all the corms, or at least the ones that came up with the roots (I’m sure there are some left behind in the beds.) My best guess is I have about 75 corms to plant or give away.
Any takers?
Early Garlic Crop
As the garlic leaves begin to die off from the bottom up, you know harvest time is near.
Once 1/3 to 1/2 of the leaves start to brown up I check a few bulbs to see what is going on and make a harvest decision. As warm as the winter was here I noticed the leaves were ahead of schedule and it dawned on me that conditions were probably right for harvest (it has not rained in a few days and the hot weather dried the beds out a bit plus thunderstorms were forecast for the coming week) so I did some checking.
I was surprised to find some of the California Late already past the “prime” harvest time, ie large enough bulb but a tight wrapper skin that had not begun to deteriorate with cloves showing signs of separating out. So I unexpectedly harvested all 3 type of garlic plus the elephant garlic over the course of Sunday afternoon.
The hardneck got floppy (sign that they are ready and then some) in just a couple days and the leaves were well on their way to browning as shown below:
The bulb size has improved as this is the 3rd generation of this lot:
As the day went on I had the hardneck as well as the creole Ajo Rojo all pulled, bundled and tagged in the shade of the large pecan tree:
The softneck was next, as the “California Late” was anything but late. The leaves weren’t as browned yet as with last year’s harvest but I was hoping for better wrappers/skins this year and opted to accept the bulbs for the size they had reached.
These were in good shape for the most part with decent size:
Elephant garlic was next (more on it in another post):
When everything was sorted, tied and tagged it parked on Lizzie’s porch while I took a break.:
The hanging system I put up last year was still in place so the actual hanging of the bundles to cure didn’t take long at all. (By late afternoon it was 90 or more and I decided to forgo farmer etiquette and exposed my pale legs to the world, of course while keeping the sturdy work boots in service.)
(Damn those are some white knees…..)
BABYTREEFROGPICTUREDAY
No words, just bandwidth slurping baby tree frog pictures. For scale, none of these is more than perhaps one inch long. Can you find all of them in the last picture?
5 Minute Monsoon
A fast and furious thunderstorm drenched the garden for 10 or so minutes this evening; things sure were glistening afterwards.
Rainbow.Blackberry.Blueberries.SweetRedOnionx2
Good bugs, bad bugs
First, the good bugs:
The water striders were among the first occupants of the frog pond. They are predators of almost any smaller insect on or near the surface; once they arrived on the pond I stopped seeing female mosquitoes on the surface and the larvae seem have disappeared completely now.
Family Gerridae – Water Striders
Barely denting the surface tension, it seems to weigh nothing:
But it creates oversized ripples as it darts away:
Last week I was pleased to find that some dragonflies have discovered the frog pond; these are most efficient predators both as adults and in their nymph stage.
Warning: I did not make this taxonomic name up ; be careful of your pronunciation. (Insert immature snickering here)
Pachydiplax longipennis – Blue Dasher
Anax junius – Common Green Darner
It will be nice if they join the growing cycle; mosquitoes are part of the cycle for sure (although they never mature beyond the larval stage due to the “dunks” I keep in the water.) They are all over the rice paddy (there are no water striders patrolling there yet).
Now the Bad bug:
What is she doing?
Laying a bazillion eggs, that’s what she is doing. Can you see the large larva underwater just behind her?
That’s all, just some bug pics tonight.
Rice Folly Part II
A couple weeks back my rice growing folly was confessed publicly ( click here if you missed it) and the partially completed paddy was unveiled.
I have fielded several inquiries since then as word has spread locally among the ragtag group of “this is not your mother’s garden” type gardeners who have become interested in this project. With the recent progress in this boondoggle I figured it is time to post an update, so here goes:
First, a couple of pictures showing the upper paddy construction in progress so that the water retention system is more obvious.
The first step was to excavate a 12″ deep basin that is roughly the size of the upper frame (previously constructed from 2x4s). Then I cut short legs and attached these to the frame; the height from the bottom of the leg to the top edge of the frame is 9″ which allows for 5-6″ depth of soil (or more accurately “muck”) and 3-4″ of weed suppressing water on top. The frame width was cut with this in mind; A width of 28″ allows for this (48″ liner – 18″(9″ depth x2) – 2″ (1″ overlap to secure to frame x 2).
Once the frame legs were attached I leveled the frame in the basin using pieces of bricks as footings and my rough-in was complete:
(Note how close I came to cutting one of my irrigation spur lines with the hoe. oops):
The next step was to cut and staple the liner in; I was careful to add the same 20″ extra to the length of the basin to compensate for the 9″ depth and 1″ overlap on each end.
Saturday morning got up in distraction mode and decided that transplanting the seedlings into the lower original paddy would be a good thing to do with a big mug of coffee @ 7:30 on a Saturday morning.
The seedling barges had been floating in the lower paddy for a few days and the higher nutrients in this pool (vs the pond) jumped their growth rate up nicely.
The seedlings the day before transplanting:
In the morning I set the speedling trays out on the edge of a bed to drain a little before I started the transplanting. As you can see, the roots were already well developed and heading “south”:
10 or 12 ounces of fresh dark roasted coffee later, I had a populated paddy:
Closer:
I spent the rest of the morning working on the much procrastinated upper paddy and eventually got it lined, properly back-filled and filled with 5″ of clay soil, ground rock sand (from the well drilling last year), peat & and composted manure. With the top edge or sill installed and the area around it smoothed and mulched, the paddy system was 99% complete. I’ll plant the upper bed’s rice directly by laying the seed on top of the soil and slowly raining the water level as the seed begins to sprout.
There is a spillway under the lip of the top bed so that overflow drains into the lower bed.
From this angle you can see the “drain”:
I still haven’t secured a “gate” at the other end of the lower bed and have been controlling the water level just by adjusting a loose 2×4 under the end of the liner; I need to figure something out there and trim the excess liner off a bit. After the harvest next month, I’ll move the small garlic bed over a foot or so for more room.
Dumetella carolinensis – Gray Catbird
Gray Catbirds are in the thrasher family and look like a smaller darker (no white) version of their cousin the “northern mockingbird”. While bored mockingbirds can be rather noisy and mischievous (translated: annoying as hell), the catbirds provide plenty of music while generally staying out of trouble.
I believe the same pair that was here last year has returned to nest in the backyard thickets adjoining me. During nesting season they primarily eat insects (from the ground) but I have noticed that on occasion they will also steal a berry or two and nip a tomato.
It seems like one or both of this pair will take a dip in the pond every evening. At first they were wary and would bolt if I came within direct view regardless of how far away I was; eventually they relaxed and have become comfortable with me in “their” garden.
The link below is to a short slideshow of one of my pair on the “bathing rock” in the well covered corner of the frog pond.
More on catbirds here: http://www.birdweb.org/birdweb/bird/gray_catbird
Tadpole tales
The “amphibian pond” hastily constructed a few weeks back really had really been more of an algae and bug reservoir until a friend shared tadpoles from his winter swimming pool cover. I really wasn’t planning on moving anything in but these would otherwise be out of luck, so a few were netted and relocated to behind cohutt’s fence.
I have seen them come up for air or @ the surface in the warm sun over the last 3 weeks but thus far had no signs of “metamorphosis”.
By chance I decided to move some logs and sticks to a spot adjacent to the pond (in order to provide cover for frogs, lizards and other small critters) just before dusk yesterday evening. I noticed the “moving V” wake of miniature frog kicks in the reflection of the sky off of the pond surface and spotted this little guy getting his first done of the “above the surface” world he was about to enter:
He (or she?) is under an inch long at this point but is probably halfway to his mature size:
Note his tadpole tale is not quite reabsorbed into his frogness yet (that is a tiny duckweed leaf on his rump) :
I believe he is Hyla chrysoscelis, Copes Gray Tree Frog.
A destructive pest insect (to growers of cabbage, kale, brussel sprouts & the like).
When you see a little white butterfly floating around your garden, carefully inspect any brassica in the ground; chances are eggs have been deposited. Soon gaping holes will appear in leaves and whole sections will disappear literally overnight. Below there will be a large amount of balck frass (aka bug poop).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieris_brassicae
A possible culprit, the Cabbage White Butterfly caterpillar
I say a possible culprit because the cabbage looper, a gray and black moth, also deposits eggs on brassicas and more. These are doubly bad in that moths are generally nocturnal (no visual warning system that they are in the area) and the “worms” are virtually invisible on the leaves (small and green).
Either way the remedy is hand picking upon discovery of holes & frass, supplemented by regular applications of the organic control BT (Bacillus thuringiensis). This is a bacteria that only affects caterpillars when ingested. The dust version is available under the brand “DiPel” and the liquid concentrate is “Bonide Thuricide”.
Behind cohutt's fence 