Goblins, Ghouls and Garlic

Since it's that time of year where vampires take center stage, I thought garlic would be a pertinent subject. And it just so happens that we planted 2.5 rows of it this this week. What serendipity!

Garlic has got to be one of the easiest crops in the history of putting things in the ground and watching them grow. You take a clove, bury it about three or four inches down, and leave it over the winter... and voila! By spring, you have an entire head of garlic that you pull out, cure, and can store for what seems like an unending period of time.

I'm simplifying things a teensy bit, of course. But garlic is actually very easy, requires fairly little maintenance once the planting is done*, and if it is cured correctly, it won't go bad for a long, long time. Compared with pretty much any other crop, garlic is just about scraping the bottom of the "I need constant supervision" chain.

Of course, you do have to plant the garlic first. And that can be quite a process.

First, you start with a head of garlic.

Every head of garlic comes with many cloves. Each clove, if planted, can produce another head of garlic. You want a head that is plump, with fairly large, well-formed cloves.

Since you're planting the cloves separately, you have take them apart.

Multiply this by 50 pounds of garlic.**

Once the cloves have all been torn asunder and any rotten ones removed, it is time to plant. In the past, Susan has done this by using the very labor intensive method of digging four trenches in each bed, laying the cloves out, and covering them with dirt. Brian, however, stepped in to save the day.

This device is called a dibbler. Seriously. Brian made it out of scraps in the garage, based on the devise he used last year to plant garlic.

The dibbler is 30 inches across, so it fits our beds perfectly. The pointy bits protruding from the bottom poke holes in the dirt, into which individual garlic cloves fit quite snugly.

One person "dibbles," going ahead of the rest of the crew and dibbling the row with hundreds of tiny holes. Everyone else follows, poking the cloves in and brushing dirt over the top. What could be easier?

Garlic also likes to be mulched, so I guess I know what we'll be doing with the forty bales of hay that arrived this evening.





*If you're growing hard-necked garlic, you do need to watch for scapes, the curly green tendrils that grow in the spring. If you let scapes grow, the garlic will be ruined, but cutting them back sends all that energy back into the bulbs, and THEN you can eat the scapes. What could be better?

**To put this number in perspective: our 50 lbs. of garlic yielded two and a half rows. Our rows are 90 feet long, so that's approximately 225 feet. To put this yet further into perspective, the farm we visited on Tuesday ordered 150 lbs. of garlic. Radical Roots, an organic farm in the valley, also ordered 150. Waterpenny Farm, which I will talk about in a later post, ordered 220 lbs.

Potato, Po-tah-to

Yesterday, I had the supreme pleasure of planting potatoes for the first time in my life.

When I was a kid, I remember harvesting potatoes. It was probably my favorite crop to pick from my grandpa's garden. He would hoist the plant out of the air with his pitchfork while I scrabbled through the dirt to find them... it was like a treasure hunt.

Susan, it seems, loves potatoes. She grows six different types, some of which are heirlooms, and almost all of which will be for the farm, not for sale.

The first order of business was preparing the field. We weeded four rows, and dug a trench in each row for the seed potatoes. (That's Brian below - he's one of the other interns.)

Then came the business of preparing the seed potatoes. We cut them into pieces, each of which needed at least two "nodes" on them. Nodes are what eventually turn into eyes.

Some of the potatoes had faces. I named mine.

Fred



Manny



Hubert

We then sloshed the potatoes around in a mixture of mycorhizal fungi and humic acid - the humic acid acts as food for the fungi, which improves the quality of the soil with its presence by increasing the microbial life there. Appetizing, no?

For the actual planting, one person would lay down the potato pieces, skin side up, in the trough. The second person followed with the hoe, covering the seed potatoes and mounding a hill of dirt over them. (Below is Autumn, the third full-time intern on the farm. We are a merry little group.)

Final note: Normally, potatoes are planted in March. By planting later, Susan hopes to escape the worst of the potato bugs... another (less enjoyable) thing I remember from my childhood. We shall see.

Getting Down and Dirty with Soil Blocks

Today, I learned the art of making soil blocks. Soil block engineering is a largely obscure craft, lacking the glamor of other, better-known skills. But I hope to change all that, and shed some light on this mysterious trade.

Soil blocks are a pretty simple method of starting seedlings to transplant later. Spring in Virginia is notorious for being somewhat crazy, I've come to realize - 80's yesterday, 50's today, for example. So planting tender little shoots that could be wiped out in a late frost is a pretty terrible idea.

Soil blocks are what they sound like - blocks of soil that we use to plant seeds, and keep in a greenhouse until they've grown a bit and the weather is nice enough to transplant them. And since they're in neat little cubes, transplanting them is easy.

First, however, we must make the soil blocks. This is a multi-step process, best done with two people - in this case, Caitlin* and myself.

The first step is mixing the ingredients. They are peat moss, lime (to balance the acidity of the peat), some organic fertilizer, sand, compost, soil and water. We mixed all this up in a big tub, eventually just diving in with our hands.

This was when I realized that today was not going to be a clean day.

After everything is properly moistened, it's time to use the soil block maker.** In the tub, you level out some soil so that it is a little bit higher than the bottom of the soil block maker, then press it down, with a lot of wiggling to make sure that the soil is packed in tight.

Then you move over to the waiting tray, press down the handle, wiggle a bit more, and soil blocks are born.

This is repeated three more times, so that the flat is filled with as many soil blocks as it can hold. Then it's time for Worker No. 2 to step in, to fill the little divots with seeds (eggplant, peppers and tomatoes today), then tamp soil down on top, label the trays, and put them aside to begin sprouting.

Which, hopefully, they do.

*Caitlin lives in Charlottesville, and has been working on the farm part-time since 2008. She knows a lot.
**There is probably an official name for this, but I don't care. Mine is probably more descriptive anyways.