Harvest Monday, 6/27/16

Viola Francese garlic. I planted garlic in styrofoam boxes at the end of November last year and went ahead and harvested them today, a couple of the heads were starting to split open so it was time. They're not large but they seem ok.

Rossa di Sulmona garlic. I also planted a couple of  unnamed varieties but they perished during the winter. The garlics are currently hanging out under the carport out of the sun.

A handful of green beans were harvested from the pole beans. The snap pole beans are infected with rust which is inexorably killing the plants.

Honestly only the Smeralda romano type pole bean is setting pods and it's the bean that's heavily afflicted with rust. That's about 10 different varieties of pole and bush beans that are not setting beans at all. I truly think it's the unbearably hot weather. We grew Cherokee Wax and a bunch of the other bush beans last year and they set lots of beans, but then again last year was much cooler and wetter.

Come join is at Harvest Monday, a place where gardeners share what they've been growing and harvesting in their gardens.

Garlic Planted in Styrofoam Containers and Bamboo Trellises

Bamboo trellises planted with pole green beans, cucumber, pole dry beans, luffa, and bitter melon.

The garden is huge. I didn't realize how much my husband had expanded the garden until I started putting up the trellises. It was actually my husband's idea to put the trellises alongside our neighbors garage. The neighbor tends to have lots and lots of outdoor parties where they sit outside and watch sports on t.v., and this will shield our backyard from view so I can garden in relative privacy.

And that's an alley running along our backyard perpendicular to the bamboo trellises. Okra will be planted along the alley side, which will shield the tomato beds from passersby. It looks like I'll have ten long beds, each about 4 feet wide available for planting.

Garlic. I had planted 4 styrofoam containers with different varieties of garlic. Two were planted with unknown grocery store garlic and the other two were planted with garlic I had purchased from a seed company. All of the unknown grocery store garlic died during the winter, only one thin waif-like stalk remains of those doomed garlic.

But as you can see the 2 varieties of fancy garlic I purchased online are doing ok in their separate styrofoam containers.

Garlic Planted in November in Styrofoam Containers

Unknown red hardneck garlic variety. All 8 cloves, and 2 out of 3 tiny bulbettes have sprouted.

I finally planted the last of the garlic in styrofoam boxes last week. 50 cloves were planted in 4 boxes, I've been debating whether or not to plant another box of garlic.

4 garlic varieties were planted. Rossa di Sulmona is a pungent hardneck variety that I purchased online, my husband cooked some tomato sauce with leftover cloves and it was wonderfully sweet and spicy. Viola Francese is a softneck type that was also purchased online. There's an unknown red hardneck variety that was purchased at a grocery store in March which I remember to be exceptionally tasty, and the cloves being fairly old had just begun to sprout. And lastly there's an unknown white softneck variety that was purchased recently at the same grocery store, surprisingly the cloves looked like they might have started forming roots before being planted.

The garlic was planted about 2 inches deep and maybe 4-5 inches apart. The styrofoam containers are actually shipping containers that would normally get thrown away, so they are thicker and bigger than most styrofoam coolers. It's been raining the last 3 days so the boxes have been hanging out under cover. As an experiment I removed the papery skins off the cloves of the unknown varieties before planting.

And today it looks like all 4 garlic varieties have a few cloves sprouting out of the soil.