SEED SOURCES:
This year I didn't buy any seed garlic. I just used (a) the cloves from the biggest bulbs (mostly Music, and five cloves of elephant), (b) the corms from this year's and last year's elephant garlic; and (c) the little bulbils that some of the garlic this year had growing in the stem a few inches above ground.
SOIL PREP:
Forked the soil. Added several buckets of Trail Road compost (a really nice healthy amount, several inches thick), lots of vermiculite (two big stainless steel bowls worth), kelp, az, mrp, and pre-soaked alfalfa. Mixed it all up with the fork and broke up as many clumps as possible. With all of this, the garlic bed (which is the entire southeast bed) is quite high, several inches higher than the surround area (which I'll try to raise up next year with more Trail Road compost).
LOCATION AND METHOD -- CORMS:
Method: For the corms, I messed up with ~half of them by (deliberately) removing the entire outer casing (down to the shiny white raw innermost bit) instead of just the hardest outer casing. (Googled after, too late, oops.) The other half I removed just the hard outer casing which it turns out is the correct way to do it. It was very easy, just used kitchen scissors to knick away at the stick-out side portions and chipped the hard casing away. Easy, but tedious. Didn't pre-soak them at all. ~9 per square foot plus a few popped in here and there randomly.
Location: In the southeastmost section are the 2025 corms, leading into the 2026 corms, all are along the southmost edge of the garlic bed, one foot "deep" (not deep into the soil!) by ~3 feet across. The ones that I peeled the inner layer off (oops) are the front most ones, with the ones behind them being the ones that I properly removed only the hard outer layer. All went ~an inch or so deep.
LOCATION AND METHOD -- BULBILS:
Method: Nothing fancy, treated them the same as cloves, just didn't plant them as deep since they're way smaller.
Location: Almost all are along the south edge, to the west of the corms. A wide square foot, so 1.~2 square feet or so, ~20 of them in there. Also, ~6 found later the same today are popped in along the west edge of the main Music patch.
LOCATION AND METHOD: ELEPHANT CLOVES
Method: Basic garlic style. Planed several inches deep.
Location: These are huge cloves! 5 of them in total planted, from the biggest/healthiest bulb harvested this year. Four are along the east edge, north of the corms, in one square foot, and one is tucked behind them along the east edge.
LOCATON AND METHOD; MUSIC CLOVES
Method: Basic garlic style. Planed several inches deep.
Location: These are huge cloves! 60 cloves in total planted! All are from the biggest bulbs harvested this year, and only nice big chonky cloves (a very few of the cloves in the biggest bulbs weren't big and chonky enough so I used them for cooking instead of for seed).
FINAL NOTES
After a good watering, covered them with burlap to try to keep out squirrels etc. Note: While planting I used short fences (held down with a few stones) to demarcate corms from bulbils etc, BUT I had to lift them out after when putting down the burlap, so this messed me up, so the fences may not be in the exact right location and I took out the panel dividing the elephant corms from the music bulbils because I lost track of where the division was. Hopefully it will be obvious next summer which are which! Also -- even though I saved the best and biggest to plant, there was still lots of harvested garlic to use for cooking! Last year I sowed about 55 cloves, so hopefully this year's 60 + 5 will be good too. (The corms won't be harvestable until 2028.)
See also my paper "map" of what's where, on the fridge and emailed to myself this evening.
Excited to see how this does next year!
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