This year, we got some help from college student Stephanie (pictured below) with pulling the garlic.  As with every year I learned a few things this year.  I already knew this, but I need to change my some of my harvest dates for the garlic depending on the variety.  Doing this will make the process easier and will result in better keeping garlic.  The harvest this year was complicated a bit by the rain we got just about every day last week.  For the most part, the rain was contained to short events, so I was able to work around it.

I have my list of projects for next year’s harvest, not the least of which is a new hanging method.  My wrist is killing me from all that staple gun work.

In the past, I more or less followed the path set out by Herrick Kimball.  His book on making garlic powder is great and there are purportedly only a few left directly from him.  But I’m never content with set processes and usually feel the need to tinker around the edges.  One big problem I had with his process was that my dehydrator does not have deep enough trayspace to accommodate whole heads like he uses for his initial drying step.  I tried various things including soaking the cloves in hot water for 2 minutes to loosen the sheath.  That was messy and probably only marginally faster.  Another issue I had was the slicing blade on my food processor.  Simply put, I found it didn’t make a clean slice.  Some of the garlic got pulped and a lot got stuck in funny places inside the food processor.  I used a knife instead.  This slowed things down significantly.

Last night that all changed.  I decided to make a small batch with some of my remaining (halfway decent) garlic.  Yeah..I’m finding it pretty incredible that I still have garlic that’s ok at this point of the year, but it gives me something to experiment with.  So what did I do?

1. I bought one of these at A Different Drummer’s Kitchen in Albany.   This was a case where I knew exactly what I wanted, but had my doubts as to whether someone made it.  In this case a strawberry slicer makes a fine garlic slicer.  This sped things up significantly.  I did find that it worked better with smaller cloves which solves another problem for me.  I never quite know what to do with all of the smaller stock that comes out of the field.  I’d always prefer to sell the bigger stuff which means I tend to end up with a bunch of small stuff at the end of the season.
2. I didn’t bother to remove the shell of the garlic.  It all went in the dehydrator with the garlic.   I’ve been reading The Contrary Farmer by Gene Logsdon.  This guy is my new hero.  A lot of his wisdom comes down to keeping things small, simple and smart.  In my case, I asked myself why I was removing the shell.  There’s a perfectly good (and much faster) process called winnowing that has been used for centuries for this exact task.  So once it was all dry, I took 2 large bowls and poured it from one to the other in front of a window fan I set up on my porch.  And yep. It worked and probably took me 1/100th of the time it would have taken to pull the shell off of each clove.

Now there is one step I will do the next time around and that’s cutting off the bottoms of the cloves.  I skipped it as a time saving measure, but I think that it should be added back in.

In any case, I think it was a success!

Completely unrelated hazy pic. The garlic field from 4-20

Today I planted a 300 foot row of onions  (all the gory details are here).  You may ask…what is he thinking. Yeah, I don’t know.  Last year was, to a degree, a failure (with a fair amount of success mixed in).  I didn’t really know what it would mean to have a little one running around, and despite all of the public pronouncements about scaling back, I probably planted as much as I did other years.  The primary difference this past year was that we didn’t engage our friends for help and also lost Kathleen as a dedicated farmhand altogether.  She’s a great mom, and I have no doubt that we will involve our little guy in the fun as soon as this summer.  Still, there will probably be only one person working at a time.

The best way to approach all of this may be to build resolutions, so here goes.

• Spend more time with family.
• Work smarter, not harder
• Get ahead of the weeds.
• Trick Engage friends for help.
• Be generous with those friends.
• Constantly re-evaluate what is working, what isn’t.
• Put up a hoop house.

One thing I’m excited about this year is that the projects on tap for this year should get the infrastructure to a point where I’m going to stop worrying about things falling down.  That’s not to say that things won’t fall down.  They will.  And that’s ok.

And now on to the 2nd meaning of spring.

Late last fall, something went wrong with the throttle on my Allis Chalmers D17.  A slight pull on the throttle bar on the steering column opened up the carb all the way and resulted in a red lined engine.  NOT GOOD.  Well, I stopped by the house of Sam, a fellow member of the Milton Grange, yesterday to look at his old D17 and he asked if I had the spring.  Now…this is definitely not stock or even something that Allis Chalmers ever intended, but this little spring provides just enough resistance to keep things from getting out of hand.

My theory is that the fundamental design of the governor isn’t all that good and this compensates for that.  Sam stated that the spring had been there as long as he could remember.  Works for me!  So SPRING!!!!

So, what did I learn this time while planting?

• The dibbler does not reach the ground when it’s mounted on the tractor.  I had the brilliant idea that I’ll pull the dibbler behind the tractor, so that my rows would be very straight.  I went as far as buying additional parts for the dibbler to adapt it to fit on my hitch.  Unfortunately, I mounted it and it just spun in the air. Doh!
• Any task that I’m going to ask others to help me with has to be done first by me.  I spent a good deal of time measuring and remeasuring to get more accurate numbers of what I was planting.  Because I spent the time, I have a great deal more confidence in my counts this year.  I’ve noticed that when I have others working for me, this kind of information gets lost.  I always appreciate the help, but I now see that I need to develop a methodology on my own before bringing others into the task.
• I can manage the whole process on my own.  That said, given my current task load, 10,000 head of garlic is a pretty realistic maximum.

As a side note, I’m hoping to make a batch of garlic powder soon.

• Garlic
• Garlic Braids
• Sprouts
• Potatoes (White and Blue)
• Butternut Squash
• Sunchokes (aka Jerusalem Artichokes)

We hope to see folks there!

Here’s a map for those that don’t know where…

To keep my day moving, I decided that I’d have a contest.  The song that popped up on shuffle that pushed that “awesome” button in the best way would win.  What would that artist win?  A small bag of garlic for each band member.  There were, of course, a couple of disqualifying points.  The artist can’t be dead.  The artist has to reside in North America.  With all due respect to our European (and other) friends, I’m not messing with customs.

OK….so drumroll please.  The winner is:

Yo La Tengo – Nothing to Hide

So, James McNew, Georgia Hubley, and Ira Kaplan your garlic awaits you.  Now to track down an address…

Update: It looks like YLT are pretty solidly on tour until December.  I’ll be sending the garlic to their PO Box then.  Congratulations YLT.

Towards the end of the day, Kathleen and Asa surprised me.  At that point, I had 50 heads of German White to break and plant.  Kathleen and I broke all the heads and then she planted the final row while I walked around with Asa on my shoulders.  He had a blast as I ran up and down the rows.

In the end, I didn’t have time to spread any of the straw, but hopefully I can get that done in the wee hours at the start and end of the day over the next few days.  I have 4 rows covered so far.

Now for the counts of what I planted:

Music – 665
MarJean – 763
Ukranian Red – 2,739
Spanish Roja – 2,152
German White – 4,159

All these numbers are based on field measurements.  There’s no doubt they’re not 100% correct, but they’re really really close.