today i started to get the garlic for next summer harvest planted. i may be a little early, but i'm hoping it won't make that much difference.
based upon results from this last garlic season i selected out 200 large cloves and most will be planted in similar soil to what i had the best results.
no clay no more. the quality was ok, the size was somewhat smaller (the largest bulbs were about 3/4 the size if the non-clay plantings), but the work to get them out of the ground is too much and depends upon the weather more than i'd like. we were stuck on garlic harvesting for a few days until some rain came along. i'd tried to harvest without the rain but after a few clumps it was not something i'd have been able to keep doing without a jackhammer or some other major source of ground breaking. which would have destroyed the patch it was planted in.
also in the clay the garlic had either birdsfoot trefoil or alfalfa as a cover. i think the net result was a wash. the less sunlight and competition for water was probably offet by there being more nitrogen in the soil. i could not tell exactly for sure as i didn't weigh or measure nor could i really control for moisture. so while the garlic grown in the clay with the cover crops would be sustainable, it would take some kind of reworking to get more organic material on a regular basis down deep enough in the clay so that you could get the bulbs harvested without resorting to dynomite, pick axes or waiting for rain to soften up the ground a bit.
in contrast the clay in the sandy loam were mostly harvested by tugging them out of the ground with one hand. only a few needed much more than that and it was done all with a small hand trowel (instead of stomping on a shovel with both feet after hopping up into the air and that was only going about 1" into the clay when it was dry).
guess where those 200 cloves are going? :) i'm about halfway done planting the garlic and then when the garlic is in i'll put peas/peapods over them as a cover crop for the fall/winter. before planting i weighed the cloves i planted so that i can get a resulting weight difference. about 2lbs of garlic. unfortunately i have yet to find a scale for more accurate weighing...
the fun continues. ;)
songbird