When my dad was visiting, he helped us get a bed ready to plant our garlic, and the next day we got it all in the ground. It was late in the day when we did that project and we came inside satisfied that evening. I can’t tell you how happy we are that we got garlic planted this year! We didn’t get any garlic planted last year and we missed it. This year we got our garlic from Salty Dog Farm. I like that they screen for pathogens every year and their organic garlic is excellent quality. Jeff has planted garlic many times throughout his life and said it was some of the most beautiful and robust garlic he’s ever planted. We planted three different varieties: Music, German Extra Hardy, and German Porcelain. It was hard for me to plant them and not eat them, I can’t wait till harvest time!

As I’ve written about before, we have a major problem with moles and it’s gotten worse every year. It has made gardening a challenge for us and we’ve lost many plants (even large blueberry bushes) to them. That little raised bed in the picture above is the first bed that Jeff and I built over the summer with hardware cloth. A very generous friend gave us an old roll of hardware cloth they weren’t using and we really appreciated it. (It’s quite expensive.) We dug deep down in the ground, made a barrier with hardware cloth, and built a raised bed with cedar. We were SO HAPPY to have a garden bed where everything we planted would be safe from moles digging underneath the roots. The rest of the garlic we planted in a large Smart Pot, that we dug down into the ground. We used compost and bone meal enriched soil to plant the garlic in and then tucked it all in for the winter with straw.

Not only were we happy to get garlic planted this year, we were happy to know that all the garlic we planted is safe from the moles!