Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Spooned.. on purpose?

You may remember when I cleaned out the lettuce boxes, the dirt went into a planting bed in the front yard. I had plans for that bed, and I actually got the plans into that bed about 2 weeks ago. I just haven't had a chance to let you all in on the changes.

What is going to go here? 
Now, I need to preface this with the fact that Daddy and I are horrible at landscaping. We bought a house that was "professionally" landscaped and within a few years the outside had gotten overgrown. Not horribly overgrown, but not as nice as it was when we bought it. Part of that is the fact the previous owners had planted these NASTY purple leaved, giant thorny bushes in all the planting beds in the front of the house which is never fun since I tend to be a only wears shoes when required to by law kinda people. For YEARS now, I have cursed and hated and wanted to set fire to those bushes, especially after we trimmed them.

This summer, I had enough, and while I won't talk about what is going in place of said nasty evil spawn of Hades bushes, I will tell you that empty patch in the front of the house is one of the places the bushes were. We pulled it out a good 2 months ago, to give it time to rest before we continued our plans.  (That bucket of rocks was from under the bushes, it has since been reused elsewhere).

On Sept 30th, Pooka and I got to work starting the revamp of the front yard. Daddy and I decided that would be a great place to plant garlic of all things. We are a big garlic family, and Daddy and I had talked most of the summer about where we should start it, but since we plan to till the beds early next spring, I didn't want to accidently destroy the garlic.

First thing we did was run out to a local organic grocery store. I had actually read this was the cheapest way to start garlic. We brought it home and proceeded to tear the cloves out of the bulb, making sure to keep the bigger cloves (the tiny ones we cooked with dinner).

Garlic it's whats for planting and dinner
Pooka and I went outside and started to work. We kinda just started in the corner of the bed and dug a hole about an inch to 2 inches deep (you can see in the picture, I went a bit deeper then I should). Then we placed the clove in with the root side (or flat part when it was in the bulb) down and the top (pointy bit) facing up.
Flat part in the added dirt, pointy bit up.
Pooka covered it up and then we went about 7 inches before the next hole was dug. Now the book I read this from said it only needed to be 3-5 inches apart, but since this is an experiment and I didn't test the soil before hand (bad scientist) to know how good it would be, I wanted to give them a bit of room.

I have no spacial relations, a measuring tape is a must
However, after the first couple of cloves, I started to forget where I planted things. I knew my short term memory was bad, but this was really bad. What was worse is that I knew if I couldn't remember where I put it now, then how would I remember it in the spring. Like any good scientist, we decided to label/mark our test plot. But what could we use? Normally we use Popsicle sticks, but those wouldn't survive the winter, and I didn't want to buy fancy (expensive) markers. I did however have a gallon sized zip lock of plastic spoons (when we use plastic for entertaining, we never seem to use the spoons), so I grabbed a bag and spooned my own yard in white, clear, blue and purple. It's not pretty, but it worked.
SPOOOOOON
After about 4 rows, I shrunk the distance between to about 5.5-6" for the rows which allows me to get 5 in a row instead of 4. (Please remember, the spoons are approximate, they are where I stuck it after I got the hole filled in).

More SPOONS....
In a few hours (we were SUPER busy that day, so it was 10 minutes here, 20 minutes here, ect). We had the 46 garlic cloves planted. Will it grow? I don't know yet. Hopefully it will grow and look nice next summer when people walk around it to go to the front door. It may not, in which case, we learn from our mistakes and try again next fall. This spot gets sun during the first part of the day. It is pretty sunny there from Sun up till it goes over the house (the house faces east), this picture was taken about 4 pm after the sun had gone behind the house.


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