Sex in a Plot

That’s sex in a garden plot! I don’t know why these photos seem so sexy to me. Well, the carrot, yes. She (clearly, it’s a she) looks like a demure, leggy vixen! I finally had to let Charlie eat her though. What would be the point of letting her languish in the refrigerator? The garlic photo, on the other hand… I guess I just think garlic, the smell of garlic, the taste of garlic, is all sexy. I love garlic. I even love garlic breath.

I harvested my first true carrots, thinning my rows. I’ll harvest now as needed. I direct seeded a new bed with carrots in mid July. Hopefully, those will mature before the hard frosts stop their growth. Fall harvested carrots are way better than summer.

Half my garlic was ready to harvest. I am super-paranoid about waiting too long. Every single garden source tells you that when the tops flop, they are ready to be dug. I have found that when most of the tops flop, I have rot. Now, it could be that the rot was due to late moisture, but how can you stop the rain from falling down? I’d rather sacrifice a millimeter of growth for healthy bulbs.

The soft neck garlic had just started flopping over when I harvested it. The hard neck (which forms the curly scapes I wrote about a few weeks ago) takes a bit longer. My softneck variety is inchillium red… or polish red… I can’t remember which. But hear this: garlic is in my top five favorite things to grow in the garden. I love it. After digging, I leave it the sun for a day or two to dry a bit, then move it to a cool dark location to cure. You can eat it whenever, but if you cure it right, your garlic will last until next season. I will earmark the biggest heads to plant in late October for next year. For some reason, that’s always hard for me to do…

The onions are still going strong. So weird. Usually they are long done. I suspect they will start to flop in the next week or so. I have the same exact problem with onions as with garlic, so I am very quick to harvest when they show the first signs of floppage. I used to try to store them over the fall and winter, but now I like to chop and freeze most of them. Having chopped and frozen onion that you can grab by the handful is habit-forming. Plus, it’s so darn maddening to spend all that time growing and weeding only to find that every third onion is rotten in the middle two months down the road.

The new mutt-chickens are in their upgraded abode. I went mental with the electric wire. The darling white picket fence is really my clever way of electrifying the fence door, which has always been a hole in my defenses since the door swings out and I couldn’t have the low wire in front of it. Now, I can easily step over the fence and open the door, but hopefully still keep marauders out. The chickens now enter the fenced run by way of a small door (unseen in the picture) that I cut into the end of the coop (nee playhouse). I am very proud of my handiwork, but was too lazy to document its making, so you’ll just have believe me when I tell you I did an excellent job. Anyway, short of Big Foot or Hedwig the Owl, I think they will be safe:

I can’t believe I just said that.