Planting garlic

Last year, I ordered some German porcelain-neck garlic for planting. Because I had nowhere else to put it, I planted it among the strawberries.

It grew fine, even though it was harder than I thought it would be to lever a hole in the soil deep enough to plant the cloves. That's because the soil in these original two strawberry beds is very clay-y and hard. (The soil we're putting in our permanent garden beds is much more friable since it's amended with compost and sand.) This is one of the reasons I want to transplant all the strawberries into the permanent garden and dismantle these original beds.

I harvested the garlic in August. The individual cloves were large, but – as suspected – the heads were fairly small (at least compared to the garlic I used to harvest in our old garden). I think the soil was just too hard to permit larger growth.

We go through a fair bit of garlic in our household. Not only does Older Daughter use it generously in her cooking, but Don slices and eats a few cloves of fresh garlic each day with his midday meal as an aid to control blood pressure.

What this means is I need to grow a lot of garlic to meet all these needs, certainly more than the modest amount I harvested this year. In other words, it will probably take a couple more years of planting every clove to ramp up the harvest until there's enough surplus for fresh eating or preservation.

Even though the permanent garden area isn't fenced against deer yet, I knew I could plant the garlic without worrying about it. It won't sprout until spring, and we'll have the garden fenced by then.

I dug out a few weeds in the beds, and raked everything smooth.

Then I broke apart all the garlic heads into individual cloves...

...and grouped them in piles of ten for easy counting. I don't remember the exact number, but it was something like 195 cloves.

These I divvied into two bowls.

I spaced them in the garden beds before planting. Each bed comfortably fit the 97 or so cloves I had counted out (half the 195 cloves per bed).

Then it was time to plant. And oh my, what a difference between the strawberry beds' hard clay-y soil and these beds' lovely friable soil. It took no more than half an hour to get all 195-ish cloves planted.

Next step, mulch. A few days before, we had purchased a bale of straw for purposes of mulch. I draped an old shower curtain over it to keep any rain off until we were ready to use it.

I used this hay sled to move the straw into the garden.

It took just a few minutes to place a thick fluffy layer of straw over the garlic. This will pack down a bit with rain and snow and protect the baby garlic all winter.

I tucked the hay sled with the straw under the porch. It will stay dry there until it's needed in the spring.

It felt good to actually do some gardening.

New bird

I got a nice photo of a female ring-necked pheasant the other day.

They're not nearly as skittish this time of year as they are during breeding season, and she posed very prettily for me.

But I also got a photo of a new bird I couldn't immediately identify. She was crouched by the side of the car in the driveway as Don and I got back from walking Darcy one evening. It was dusky and the light was fading, so the photo isn't the clearest. The bird didn't seem overly alarmed by our presence, though of course we kept Darcy well away from her.

Clearly she's in the Galliformes order of birds, and at first I thought she might be a chukar. But now I think she's a spruce grouse. Here's a photo from Cornell's "All About Birds" website:

Both my bird books (Golden Guide and Roger Tory Peterson Guide) mention these birds are fairly tame, as indeed she was.

If I'm wrong about her identity, let me know. But it always gives me a minor thrill to spot a new species of bird.

A note on Younger Daughter

In light of the developing conflict in the Middle East, several readers have expressed concern for our Navy daughter, who is currently stationed in Europe.

We just talked with her today, and she's fine. Since she's on shore duty for the next few years, we're praying she won't be directly involved in this horrible situation. She's confident she's not in immediate physical danger.

The same can't be said for other members of the military. And, of course, things can change in a moment as the political winds shift and the conflict involves more and more nations and people.

It breaks my heart to read about so many innocent lives lost. Please continue to pray that this conflict can be resolved without further escalation.

The nuclear strawberries are still at it

Last year I was joking about how our strawberries are"nuclear strawberries" because they were still bearing into October and November. Well, they're at it again.

If the beds look sloppy, it's because I'm potting many of the runners with plans to transplant them into the new garden beds. At some point, I'm going to take my chances and also transplant the established strawberries into the new beds, since we want to dismantle this little driveway garden and transfer everything to the permanent garden. But that's a post for another time.

So here it is almost mid-October, and the strawberries are still producing. They've slowed down a bit, but haven't stopped.

They seem to ripen in a different manner this time of year, a sort of "bottoms up" method.

I'm collecting a bowl-full about every five days. These I hull, slice, and freeze.

While a lot of people turn their strawberry crop into jam, I don't bother. None of us are jam or jelly fans, so strawberry jam would just go uneaten.

But sliced frozen strawberries? We have a million uses for them.

Mushrooms of mystery

Ahh, a day off. After an intense two-week bout of work, I celebrated the evening with a glass of wine and a book in the rocking chair on the porch.

I noticed some mushrooms in the yard. This is just one of several examples of these white mushrooms popping up, in the nature of mushrooms, everywhere...

...including pushing through rock in the driveway.

I don't know my mushrooms, so perhaps someone can help identify them.

Then this morning while walking Darcy, I was startled to see these beauties. Pink mushrooms?

They were growing in a semi-shaded slope of the roadside ditch.

I'd never seen such a thing. They were beautiful.

As I finished snapping pictures, I glanced down the ditch and saw a whole bunch more. Go figure.

Mushrooms of mystery. Anyone know their fungi? Who can identify the species?

Sorry for the silence!

Sorry for the silence, dear readers. It's been an intense two weeks of work.

Normally I work three days a week at my online job. However for the last two weeks, I've been covering for an absent coworker. I've had two days off in the last fifteen days, and ten of those days have been without a break. I normally work 12-hour days, so it's been intense.

I'll be all finished Saturday night and intend to have a glass of wine to celebrate. I'll get back to more regular blogging after that.

Watch that mud

We've had a few good rainstorms in the last week or two, so I decided to start a burn barrel.

However the burn barrel had gotten moved over the summer when a neighbor came to dig a hole in the driveway. After filling in the hole, the dirt packed nice and solid and we crossed the area without any problem for the last couple months.

However after a few good rains, the section was a muddy mess and the mud stuck to any footwear foolish enough to venture into the vicinity.

When I started a fire in the burn barrel, I started out wearing sneakers. Let's just say that didn't last long. I switched over to mud boots, and the mud was caked on so thick I tracked it everywhere (porch steps and deck) and didn't dare come into the house.

Unfortunately this muddy patch was right in the pathway between the house and the driveway, which meant delicate tiptoeing whenever we needed to get from Point A to Point B.

So Don patched it. He started by rolling out some weed cloth.

He cut it generously to size.

Then he fetched several loads of gravel from near the barn and brought it around to the front of the house.

It took several loads.

Afterwards he raked everything flat.

The result is a nice solid patch.

We're trying to get little projects like this done before the snow flies. Come winter, we won't have to worry about sinking up to our ankles in mud.

Staying alert

It's helpful to know every bump, every crevice, every tree in our little corner of the world. It means we can be alert to any changes.

Consider the scene below:

It was easy to spot what was different.

I'm sure the hawk was being alert too, but it was also busy preening itself, which was actually rather cute.