We've Got Garlic!

Next year's garlic crop has been planted!

Last year I ordered the planting stock (as garlic that you can actually plant seems to be called) very late so my order was basically "whatever you have left that would be easy to grow."  That translated into Polish White and Susanville varieties.  It turns out both are "softneck" garlic types, which didn't make sense to me until I was planting this year's "sampler pack."  This

is a "hardneck" garlic--which means it has a big stick-thing in the middle of the head & cloves growing around it.  As it also turns out, only hardneck garlic grows "scapes," which I'll show you pictures of when they actually grow.  Other bloggers were talking about all the things they were doing with their scapes last year (my favorite being Rachel's idea for garlic pesto--doesn't that just sound wonderful?), and I kept checking my garlic and wondering what the heck I was doing wrong.  (With gardening, always go with the most likely problem)  IT TURNS OUT IT WASN'T ME!!!!  Truly, this made my day.

Our sampler pack contained 8 types of garlic, but since there was exactly one CLOVE--not one HEAD--of elephant garlic, and some of the hardneck garlic heads had a whopping 4 cloves, so it's less garlic than it sounds.  Garlic likes nitrogen in the soil, so I left some space in-between the rows to plant peas early this spring.  (Peas are a legume, so they add nitrogen back into the soil).

I recently read that garlic will adapt to the environment & planting conditions, so I decided to plant a little Susanville from this year as well.....but of course that first meant figuring out which ones were Susanville.  The pack came with a head of Polish White

which is purple and not actually white, so I'm not sure about the naming, but at least I could go to our supply of garlic and look for ones that didn't look like this.  The problem has been that both types are slightly purple, so I think they look pretty much the same, but I found two

that I thought looked different, so we have two "mystery garlic" rows.

This year I did make a careful map of where I planted the cloves & how many, so I'm hoping I can tell the difference this year.  I'm pretty confident on the elephant garlic, but not so positive of the rest.......Now if I can just not lose my map before next summer......