late winter notes

[songbird]

today we had a few inches of fluffy snow to cover. yay! looks nice to see some snow on the ground.

wandered around the gardens yesterday to see how things were faring as spring is getting nearer.

sadly we've not had much snow cover and the temperatures have been well below freezing so all the nice garlic tops that were green and growing have been frozen. last winter there was snow cover to keep the worst of the cold from damaging the tops so we went into spring with plenty of top growth. it will be interesting to see if it makes much difference with the final results.

the spring bulbs continue to try to poke up further, but it will still be a while yet before the flowers appear.

the wormies in the worm farm are still chugging along. i'm at full capacity of

14 containers and most of them are pretty well populated by now with worms. the last few started only a month or two ago will take a bit longer to get busy, but whatever they do break down of the paper and veggie scraps is a big improvement over the base clay garden soil i've mixed in. at least with the worm bins i do get some chance to play in the dirt through the winter.

and we are starting to plan what we will plant where for the veggie gardens. a month or six weeks and i should be able to start some of the early planting if we don't have any late big snow storms. we'll see...

songbird

[Gary Woods]

Prolly won't hurt them a lot, though it costs the cloves some energy. Don't know about your location, but maybe planting a bit later would help; best to not see any top growth before winter sets in.

[Ecnerwal]

Mine is usually up and frozen and does not mind a bit. I would not stress about it. I suppose there might be types that would mind, but they won't survive the local selection process...even the stuff that's behind (still down in the ground) will come up in spring and get frozen multiple times. Last year most of the bed was up and getting frozen off and on from December onwards. Didn't seem to affect it at all - not even foliage damage. I like garlic from the easy-care perspective.

[songbird]

i'm in mid-michigan here, normally (or naturally) these garlics if left alone will start regrowing mid-to-late August. these are then harvested the next summer.

if i don't replant them until there is no chance of them starting to grow again i'd have to wait until late November or perhaps even longer now that we are having such wimpy winters.

i'll see how these turn out. waiting longer to plant would be better as i could put another crop in that space before the garlic.

songbird

[songbird]

i wouldn't say i'm stressed by it, just curious how much of a difference there might be.

my guess is that even if there is some damage the added days of growth and putting energy down into the soil and roots will pay off. the plants had two and a half months of growth before it finally got too cold for them to do much, but they stayed green up until we had overnight lows in the single digits.

we'll see what next summer brings.

songbird