It looks like spring is around the corner.
If, like me, you didn’t get your garlic sown last October, you can still plant it now and expect a harvest mid-July, albeit with smaller bulbs. My garlic crop last summer developed a mould that destroyed most of it, so this year I’m drenching the bed a week ahead of time with beneficial microbes that will hopefully kill off the spores and prevent a recurrence. Actually, I’ve already drenched the soil just before it snowed but will do it again in case the microbes died in the frozen soil.
Three weeks after the cloves have been planted, I’ll drench the soil again with the beneficial microbes and again in another three weeks. David says I may be getting a little obsessive about this but I really want to kill off that mould. I’m just glad we had a bumper crop the year before and I dehydrated enough to get us through this year, but what about next year? To ensure good results I plan on spraying the leaves with compost tea regularly, harvesting the bulbs when the lowest two leaves start to brown, usually mid-July. So far the slugs haven’t bothered my garlic and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they continue to eschew this early crop.
I haven’t been so lucky in transplanting or sowing peas into the garden this early though. Even after spraying transplanted peas with an onion/garlic/pepper spray that slowed down predation, enough damage had already been done by the slimy chompers that decent pea pods never developed. This year I’ll hold off transplanting pea seedlings until the soil dries up somewhat and spray that right away with the onion/garlic/pepper solution and sow the next third of peas directly into the soil and drench the soil with that same solution.
I saved peas from the biggest pods on the largest plants last year and plan to continue saving those seeds. Since peas are mainly self-fertile, I mark the best plants with a bright ribbon and don’t harvest any of them for eating. I leave them alone all season and only harvest them when I pull down the vines. Then I put the ones being saved for seed into a separate basket to dry out and store in a cool, dry place for next year. The rest I dry out too, but store them separately to use over the winter. Pea seeds are viable for between two and four years in dry, cool storage.
It’s been pouring rain for two days now and the snow is melting. Let spring begin! In sunny Pamplona they have the running of the bulls, but in the damper climes of Mesachie we have the stomping on the slugs. Last year I sent David out to chase them with the weed whacker but he refuses to do it again until I buy him eye protection.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
