07/13/2012

It rained all night last night, which is good, since we're still recovering from near drought conditions in June. I knew it would be very wet this morning, so didn't even try to get up early to go outside and work on anything. I actually slept in until almost 9:00, although I was awake for a bit before I actually got up. It rained on and off for most of the day, and I worried that today was going to end up being another unproductive day.

After dinner, though, the sun came out. I decided that I wanted to try to accomplish something, so went out, even though it was very wet. I had recently remembered that I had never harvested the last of the garlic. I knew it was well past the optimum time to harvest it, so I decided to do it today even though it was so wet. I'm glad I did, because the impacts of waiting too late were obvious. The bulbs had lost a lot of the paper, and a couple actually had cloves starting to separate from the rest of the cloves. I'll need to go ahead and use these 5 bulbs first, because I don't think they will store very well. They should be fine, though, for fairly short term use.

After harvesting the garlic I decided to go ahead and place the new barrel we bought for storing water at the garden and fill it. I decided to do it today for two reason; first, because it was taking up space in the shed where I park the RTV, and second, because I had easy access to water to fill it. The creek that runs through our property is fairly shallow, with water usually no more than 6-8 inches deep in most spots. There are a couple of deep spots, however, and one of these is where I normally get water for the garden. It had been dry for some time, but after all of the recent rain the water was about 2 feet deep today. Had I waited until the creek was dry again, I would have had to get water from the big creek, across the road, which is not quite as easy to get to. So now we have a barrel sitting at the garden with 30 gallon of water in it. The only things we had planted in the main section of garden this year was the garlic and potatoes. Even though we still need to harvest one of the potato varieties, the plants are dead, so there is no need to water those. We'll probably need some water for the cover crop we plant, but we thought we'd likely be using more on the raspberry and blackberry briars, so that is where I placed the barrel for now.

Today I also received the new books that I recently ordered. I've not had a chance to look through them yet, but I am excited to do so. One is on root cellars, and the other two are about garlic.