How to Plant Garlic

Garlic planting time is upon us in the cold climate areas. We've been shipping out lots with more to follow. There is definitely still time to plant if you're not under snow. You can find our available varieties and order your seed at www.greatnortherngarlic.com. If you're wondering how to plant, it's easy. Noah made our first instructional video. Check it out:

You can also find information at out our Garlic Planting 101.

Newsletter!

We were quite excited. After a lot of building, and writing, and testing, we sent off our first newsletter the other day letting everyone know that it's time to order garlic for planting. (High five Mailchimp!) We'll be sending out our first shipments to Alaska tomorrow.

But there's more than a time to order reminder in the Great Northern Garlic newsletter. We recapped our year in garlic. It was quite a busy one, but we kept it pretty short. :) There's a quick recap of our first garlic festival attendance, a feature on a couple of our beautiful varieties of garlic, and a super cute photo of our son (we couldn't resist!). We'd love to post the newsletter here but there's no way to embed it. If you'd like to take a peek just click the link and it will open right up: http://eepurl.com/vH9AL

Beautiful Nootka Rose ready for fall planting

www.greatnortherngarlic.com

Our First Garlic Festival!

We've cleaned and packed the garlic. We've picked the extra vegetables at the farm. We've made our deliveries to the Pastime Bar & Grill who is featuring our organic garlic and heirloom tomatoes on their garlic themed menu. We've packed the truck. We're ready!  Here's where we'll be this weekend...

Garlic Planting 101

So you're ready to plant some garlic? Garlic is planted in the fall and harvested the following year. It may seem like a terribly long time to have to wait. But, when it pops up first thing in the spring it just might feel like that is the best part!

Garlic isn't hard to grow. Here is a basic rundown of what you need to do:

• Plant a few weeks before your location gets its first frost. (Basically about the time the rest of the garden is finishing and you are doing fall cleanup.) 
• Prepare a bed, nice and deep, work in some good compost if you have it.
• If it isn't done already, separate your bulbs into cloves, keeping the paper skins in tact.
• Plant cloves 6-8 inches apart.
• Cloves are planted with the root end down, pointy end up.
• Push cloves into the soil to  a depth about 3 times the clove's length.
• Give your garlic plot a good watering. 
• Cover planted garlic with 3-6 inches of organic mulch. (Straw, alfalfa, grass clippings or old hay all work great.)
• You are all finished until next year, now just wait for your garlic to grow!

Simple, isn't it? Your garlic will likely be the first green thing up in the garden the next year. Ours starts emerging just days after the snow recedes.

One thing to keep in mind when planting is that you will need to be able to weed the bed in the spring. We plant our garlic four abreast in beds two feet wide, this way we can weed from either side of the bed without straining our backs.

Thanks Most Interesting Man in the World!

The Great Northern Garlic Website is Open for 2013 Seed Orders!

We've been working hard around here! There is always weeding to do. Crop maintenance. Planting. We've been harvesting peas and lettuce. We planted over 300 tomato plants, over 60 pumpkin seeds, and loads of potatoes! Lucky for us we've had a few thousand cute little helpers to control some of the pests.

And we have to take time for fun. There's been bike riding down the mountain, swimming at the lake, and hanging out with the geese at the pond.

How the time flies! It's hard to believe that it is almost time to start harvesting garlic! We were lucky to have a few days of hard rain, which gave us the opportunity to work on the website. We've been wanting to do that for some time now. After rewriting the descriptions for each of our 15 garlic varieties....

we opened up the website for garlic seed orders!

Our crop estimates are in and we've been wanting to make ordering available for a while now, to make it convenient for you, so we are quite pleased! We have some wonderful varieties that you will love in the garden... and in the kitchen. Hop on over to www.GreatNorthernGarlic.com and check them out!

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Origins 2

 This is Part 2 Of Our Origin Story, to read Part 1 go here.

 So we loaded the log cabin into a U-Haul truck a piece at a time along with our other few meager possessions. Loaded our few goats we had acquired and learned to milk into the back of the '65 and we were off. I think we signed something that said we wouldn't take the U-Haul off road......sorry U-Haul it was only 24 miles or so.
  I believe it was the 20th of September 1995 when we "landed" in (our) New World. By the 20th of November we would sleep in the cabin for the first time. Six inches of snow on the ground and a tarp for a door. It was invigorating to say the least.

  A day or two before, Noah was kicked in the chest by Clyde, one half of our pair of Belgian draft horses (Bonnie being the other half of the pair).

 A few broken ribs and 20 below zero temperatures almost finished us off that first month. We learned about something called 'creosote'. A build up of creosote in our stove pipe caused the pipe to become clogged and thus fill the cabin with smoke. We had to just shut the stove down and endure the sub-zero temps....Noah was too sick to get out of bed, let alone fix the problem.
  Luck had it that a neighbors visiting son stopped by. He found us looking like death warmed over (warmed being a relative term of course). He took down the stove pipe and unclogged it and built us a fire.
  That near death experience averted, the rest of our first winter went smoothly. We had put in enough firewood, we had put in enough hay, the cabin was warm. We learned about the weather patterns on our mountain, the prevailing winds, how low the sun stayed on the horizon and how short the winter days were. All really essential information for designing an alternative energy powered lifestyle.
 To be continued........