Last October mentioned garlic wife had planted wondering if it would survive the winter cold and snow. Here it is the end of May and I noticed wilting of a plant in a pot on the deck and I just pulled a mature bulb from the pot.
I had begun to have misgivings about my ginger for the same reason (without the snow, of course). A couple of weeks ago, I noticed green shoots peeking up between the leaves in its tub and, 'yaay, it's ginger. Just the grocerey store stuff and kind of bland, not spicy hot but still pretty tasty and a lot less pricey than the current $2.49/lb at the local off-price store.
Last year we put up a hoop house over my wife's garlic row. This was a plastic sheet over seven plastic hoops anchored to the ground with sections of rebar. The whole thing was about 24 feet long, 4 feet wide, and about 2 feet high at the high point in the middle of the hoops. The garlic grew under there, undisturbed for the winter. We live in Maryland, north of Baltimore and a few miles in from Chesapeake Bay. We had a mild winter but there were a few freezing periods and some snow flurries.
We uncovered the hoop house a couple of weeks ago and the garlic were growing very well. She's harvested much of it and has it on the drying rack at the moment.
Paul
that's pretty early!
i won't think about harvesting bulbs until the scapes start showing up and a few of the lower leaves start to turn color.
in the meantime i have green garlic i can dig up and use.
i saw some pictures of someone's harvest of garlic from the south that they took up a few weeks ago. to me it looked too early and small. i hated to say anything about that so i didn't.
as a coincidence today i used up some of the garlic i had put into storage from last year. it was just barely accept- able for what i was doing with it, but if i'd wanted to dry it or grind it and freeze it i could have had a small container of garlic from the four bulbs i had left. instead i chopped it all up (after using what i needed) and fed it to the worms.
songbird
fresh ginger is so different from powdered or pickled that i consider it a whole different spice/ingredient. so good. :)
songbird
Did the worms demand some oregano and parsley to go with the garlic?
:-)
they're not too picky. along with the garlic they got carrot ends, broccoli and cauliflower stems, dried ends of green onions and lettuce cores and leaves that were too far gone. the buckets also had some dried up pea sprouts that needed to be buried so that was yet another green - they probably eat better than i do... i also have egg shells that get included along with paper and cardboard scraps. not much organic material gets put out with the recycling here.
songbird
Dang! A gourmet restaurant for worms. You aught to start charging them for your services!
Wait, you already do that when you steal their poop to fertilize your garden.
:-)
T wrote: ...
the sad thing is that when i put them out into the gardens only a few survive. adult worms really don't cope well with rapid change in soil conditions on top of the fact that many of them are not natives so they will not survive the weather extremes.
the worms that will survive are those that are natives and who are just about to hatch from their cocoons and perhaps some of the smaller ones that have a chance to acclimate.
i don't steal their poop. i just take the buckets out and put them where i want to use their poop/pee and then i keep a few buckets back which are used to restart the buckets. to take the time to sift the worms from the buckets would take way too long and i'm not running a fancy setup where i could be more able to let the worms migrate like some do. that's both more expensive and takes more equipment than a simple bucket like what i'm doing.
songbird
They sound really pampered. I can hear the now:
Fred: slave is briging more table scraps!
Harvey: Hmmm. These vegi's taste like they were grown in our poop.
Fred: I am pretty sure that was your poop Fred
<fight ensues>One of the local's sells a quart of the stuff for 80 U$D. That will be a cold day in ...
My ground pots now all have a single resident worm.
:-)
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