Planting Green Garlic with temperatures back over 100

As expected and normal October starts with a few days over 100 degrees.

Luckily it only reaches that temperatures for an hour or two before cooling down with the shorter day lengths we have at this time of the year compared to in the summer.

All the fall veggies are not too happy with the heatwave but we are keeping them watered so that they do not get stressed out.

With the heat we have taken a pause on lots of our planting for this week as it isn’t ideal to stress out a plant the moment it gets planted. But we did plant cloves of garlic yesterday that we will be harvesting for green garlic in the new year.

Whenever growing garlic there are a decent amount of bulbs that end up messed up in one way or another that we can’t sell them so we are using those bulbs of garlic for the green garlic.

Those bulbs of garlic were broken apart by us and then we put them in a fridge for four weeks to mimic winter. Garlic needs to experience cold temperatures for the development of their bulbs and the vernalization mimics that since they won’t be experiencing a full winter before we begin to harvest them.

It will be very interesting to see how this garlic grows as its the first planting of garlic for us that will be grown in soil where we added compost. Last fall we planted all the garlic before we got our delivery of compost.

This year most of our plants are looking healthier than they did last year and compost was one of the changes we made so we are going to pay attention to see if it has an affect on the garlic.

Every week it seems like we are starting to harvest new veggies and we will have more today at the Wednesday Davis Farmers Market which has changed its hours to 3-6 p.m. for the winter.

We are not transplanting any veggies in the field this week so lots more time to spend weeding while it’s hot out.

Having planted so many fall veggies over the last six weeks there are also lots of weeds growing in the fields due to us watering the veggies to keep them from getting stressed.

We have been using the tools we have whenever possible to do the weeding and trying out different ways to use them to reduce the amount of hand weeding we have to do.

Unfortunately it hasn’t eliminated all the hand weeding especially on our direct seeded crops which we water with overhead sprinklers. The weeds are intermingled with the germinated seeds so a tool would just dislodge the veggies at the same time leading us to do more hand weeding right in the lines of direct seeded veggies.

For the transplanted veggies it is much easier as the transplants start ahead of the weeds and the spacing makes it simpler to use weeding tools. There still is a little hand weeding but a much smaller percentage of the time we spend weeding them.