Awesome! What fertilizer do you use, and will you use it just once?

Chris

In the spring for garlic I use granular urea (46-0-0) dissolved in water at a rate of 1.5 oz urea/gallon water. I fertilize once when the new growth starts (now), then again in late March/early April, and a third time in late April/early May.

Last evening I went out and loosened/fluffed the leaf mulch around several garlic that were struggling to find their way thru it. I still need to do the same on another bed tonight. Forecast is for 70 degrees thru Saturday and then highs in the 50s for the next 2 weeks.

I wish I could start that process, but we are still expecting some chilly temps. Tonight will be in the low teens here.

So you only use a high nitrogen fertilizer each time? Would fish emulsion be sufficient, or is that too weak?

Yes in the spring I only use nitrogen. Prior to planting in the fall I till in some compost and GardenTone organic fertilizer. I think a lot of people use fish emulsion but I'm not sure of the application amount or frequency. I like Urea for all of the nitrogen hog veggies because it is cheap (~ $25 for 50 lbs) and I don't need to use much. It also has no P or K which I don't need any more of for garlic, lettuce, onions, Brassicas, etc due to the compost I add in the fall. It can also be applied dry prior to a rain or watering.

Highs here in Minneapolis are forecast all to be above freezing and getting as high as 50 degrees here through the end of next week. I expect to see last fall's shoots show up again as the snow melts and start to grow around here too. This is real, real early for us, though. I have seen this kind of very early thaw before, however, and that usually means some sort of spring drought and an early wildfire season here. I have had to water in early March for some of my perennials a time or two in the past. When spring shows up before the spring rains start, lots of early growth can suffer from lack of water.

We have been pretty dry, but getting just enough to keep things moist. The mulch seems to be keeping the garlic beds nicely moist so far. I will be putting in 6 new raised beds this weekend so the semi-dry soil will be much easier to deal with than mud. Today the wind is howling 30+ mph so that should help dry things out some more.

Wind is howling up here, too; so our snow cover is very likely to take a real beating real soon. Spring drought used to plague my perennials, especially those that send out tiny runners like mums, shasta daisies, and monardas, all of which I love, but have taken a real beating early in the season when rain was delayed. These days my hardy as a stone daylilies and hostas are my main perennial flowers and the rest is more or less vegetables. All told there aint all that much in the first place.

I was going to take my drill out on the lake ice this afternoon to see if I could find some crappies, but the wind was just too much. I expect if you can work the dirt you have open water to fish for slabs, too. :)

Plenty of open water around here. I don't think we ever got cold enough this year for the ice to get thick enough to walk on even on small ponds. I wouldn't want to be out on the water in a boat today with the wind howling again. We have some major grass fires going on in the area.

Sun started coming up at 6am this morning. Feels like Spring is coming!

Enough snow melted that last fall's garlic growth is now sticking up out of the receding snow. It didn't even freeze last night! Very mild here and continuing through the next week.

It was so nice today I worked in the garden. Pulled up some dead leftovers, cut my asparagus ferns, cleaned up some leftover tomato skins that did not decompose. I am going to go get some black plastic to put down where I will be planting eggplants and peppers.

Awesome!
This weekend's temps are really starting to get me excited about the growing season. Not too much longer before the tomatoes and peppers get started!

Seeing some garlic sprouts near the surface, but when pulling back the mulch a little I didn't see too many. Seeing as I planted 48 of them, I hope the other sprouts are under the soil level still.

Very nice day here in the Okanogan Valley (North-Central WA). We've had a lot of snow that stayed for sometime and insulated the ground. I don't think it froze more than 1-2 inches deep. Just checked today and I have garlic coming up 1-3 inches high. I've moved the straw mulch aside and look forward to much garlic. It appears that I have at least 95-100% of the cloves "taking".

As an aside I just finished winter sowing my brassicas.

Some Fall sprouted garlic. Not looking so hot. But normal I think. I was actually able to pull a few weeds.

I finished fluffing the mulch around all of my garlic. Only a handful of the 206 that I planted are no shows so far. Fall planted Shallots are also sending up new growth. The red shallots are a little ahead of the Dutch yellow. I started 30 broccoli yesterday...Early Dividend and Bay Meadows. I'll start some Green Magic broccoli in a couple weeks for my later season harvest since it does better in the heat.

I am only growing Green Magic this year. I am going to start them next weekend, cauliflower next weekend also (I have some burpee packet... winter dream I think... it's all I have got. Haven't grown cauliflower before.) I am going to try a couple spring brussels sprouts and sow them today, and the quick start cabbages I will maybe wait 2-3 weeks as they did not do so well in the cold and did really well in the summer.

I have the plastic sheeting and row covers ready to go if I jumped the gun.

The next nice day we have I am going to "winter" sow spinach and shallots outdoors.

The snow is almost completely gone up here, although the ground is
still frozen. Here are what my garlics look like coming out of the
winter. I am amazed at how well they seem to have stood up to this past winter, which was admittedly mild (only a couple of nights even got close to -20 with no extended period below zero). I never quite got around to mulching them either. The only things not shown are my Music which is just starting to show and is a bit behind the Vietnamese red and my two stub rows of bulbils which are just now starting to show tips like the Japanese below. All varieties seem to be showing new growth out of the middle, which I take for a very good sign.

These are my three turbans (whose tags I lost when my laptop died) and on the top right are Viet Namese Reds. The turbans came right up last fall and don't seem to have missed a step. They are just about the biggest so far despite being the last planted. (There are tulips planted in the gap between the varieties here between the two white stakes.)

Mixed in there are the June planted cloves I didn't dig last fall:

Two different grocery store garlics, one a softneck, the other a hardneck:

Siberian with Japanese just starting to show noses at the very bottom:

Feral garlics collected from my sister's backyard:

All in all I am amazed at how good they all look.

Looking great Dutch. Get a little more sun on that soil to thaw it out and away they go! I thought you grew some Estonia Red also, no? Isn't it nice to see the first new green growth on the garlic this early? Makes me want to get out and plant something else but I'll have to be content with indoor starts and prepping my new raised beds for now.

I have 6 yards of garden mix being delivered this afternoon. We are supposed to be in the sixties this weekend so I'll have nice weather when I'm carting the soil from the pile to the beds. Supposed to be a little dip in the weather here mid next week and then trending back up into the sixties again. Looks like your weather forecast is much the same as mine minus about 10 or 15 degrees.

I went to my favorite garden shop over lunch yesterday to pick up a bale of Pro-mix and they already had the seed potatoes out so of course I had to pick some up. 4 lbs of Yukon Gold, 3 lbs of Red Pontiac, and 3 lbs of French Fingerlings all for $.75/lb. Their first Dixondale delivery is supposed to come in next week so I'll be going back soon. I want to get the onions while they are still fresh from the field. Still a couple weeks early to plant out the potatoes and onions but I can take better care of the onions at home to keep them fresh and I'll start chitting the seed potatoes. Still haven't fed the garlic yet either. I need to make a list!!

Nice OldDutch! I went out today and my garlic is indeed showing new growth. Looks like it is basically right behind the daffodils. Happy to see it!

My plot is pretty much ready to go and I am going to try sowing some spinach and mustard greens this weekend sometime. I am also going to start the rest of the brassicas indoors this weekend. I ordered my potatoes from Ronniger's, LFD is mid to late April so I still have a while on that.

Jack, never grew Estonian Red. I've heard about it, but my main type is Music. Most of the rest is on probation, except the feral. I am trying to cut my varieties back to no more than about half a dozen centered around three or four main ones. Back when we sold perennials, we got soil delivered in, too. Found out the hard way that it is worth it to get it sterilized. It took years to get rid of some of the hitchhikers that unsterilized soil brought with it, the one year we went that route. We get about the same weather as you just about as much cooler as you say pretty much all winter, but we catch up in the summer a lot of times just a bit more rain than Kansas generally gets.

Peter and Jack, I get my potatoes off the organic rack at my local supermarket - I like the banana fingerlings. :) They can be planted as early as the ground can be worked. My late grandfather used to say plant your spuds on Good Friday, which is March 25th this year. The problem with Grandpa's ditty was that back home the ground was often still frozen through Easter; same here in Minneapolis. ha. He somehow always managed to put in a few on Good Friday; my parents would plant later when it got fit and his never seems to get much ahead of theirs. A hint: cut your seed potatoes several days to a week in advance and store them dark but at room temperature to let the cuts heal before putting them in the ground. You get less seed rot and better stands. My late father's main choice on potatoes were Red Norlands and Kennebecs; you gotta go aways to beat them. I don't have a family to feed, just myself; so I find the fingerlings much easier to handle with better portion size control.

Does nobody here start lettuce, like the butterheads and the crispheads, early for early transplants? Even early direct seeding works, since lettuce is about as hardy as anything else we grow from seed in the garden. My mother's first crop was always her spring radishes, but early transplanting of romaine, butterhead and crisphead lettuce is amazing at how quick you can start harvesting leaves to add to early scallions and early radishes in one's salads (you don't have to wait for full heads to set aside some for cut and come again leaf lettuce, but early transplants provide remarkably early full heads, too).

About pictures: I resize my images to 640x480 for uploading; that goes a whole lot faster than the much larger images I get from my digit camera. I have a real slow connection in the first place. There may or may not be an adjustment on that camera, but I am a pure novice with it. I will have to go back over the settings. For now I use Irfanview to resize which is free. In the blog space they may look a little small, but if you put the + of your mouse over the picture and click you will get an enlarged version which shows detail much better.

I don't start lettuce indoors. Seems like a cool idea but I have too much going on in my small seed starting space already. I would direct sow out now but I don't imagine they would germinate? Carrots too, they are very slow to germinate even in warmer ground, and don't transplant well either.

Considering the potatoes can't really get going until after LFD, I am not in a hurry to rush any out.

I normally have my potatoes up and rowable well before LFD around here. Also lettuce requires cool to germinate, too warm and it will not. Carrots don't mind the cold either but like you say do not transplant well anyway. All three are hardy enough that some frost is not going to bother them in the least. Very often radishes are planted thinly along with the carrots to break up the ground and keep it from crusting. Harvesting the radishes helps to thin the carrots, too. Try baby carrots, and then you can have all those things except potatoes out by shortly after your LFD, and then you can reuse the space for warm weather crops like sweet potatoes, eggplant and okra... Or summer squash, early melons, sweet corn, string beans, LOL the list goes on...

To be crude about it most of your early crops don't give a **** about LFD. The important thing to them is last HARD frost date, meaning down into the mid to lower 20s and colder.

Yes I know, I am not concerned about the temps I am concerned about them germinating. I feel like it would be a good idea to wait until soil temps are like 50. I dont want the soil to turn to concrete from early working either. Except the potatoes... I don't want the foliage getting damaged so I will wait until 2 weeks before anticipated LFD.

Last hard frost date could be over a month from now. This is a freak winter, but the weather is unpredictable still.

I'm putting my potatoes and onions out either March 13 or 19 depending on the weather. When I picked out my seed potatoes I chose all egg sized seed for the Yukons and French Fingerlings, but the Red Pontiac were all pretty big so I will have to cut and heal those before planting. I too go about 1 week for healing. I might go ahead and start hardening off one container of bunching onions and try to get them out a little sooner...they are going into their 9th week now and looking good. Our LFD is mid April here on average but I have a gut feeling we are going to be a couple weeks earlier this year. I have 250' feet of Agribon 19 waiting for something to protect and it's not doing much protecting sitting in my basement!

I have 6 day old broccoli growing well and will start some lettuce under lights this evening to plant out around good Friday or maybe even the weekend prior. I like to plant out lettuce at about 20-25 days. I'm starting Muir and Nevada (Batavian), Rhazes (Bibb), Sparx and Jericho (Romaine), Breen and Dragoon (mini Romaine). I have been growing lettuce indoors under lights most of the winter and have been amazed at how much production I have gotten. I haven't had to buy any lettuce at the store for a couple months and we have salads a couple times a week. They do take up quite a bit of room though so it is time for me to use up what is left to make room for the important stuff.

I need to take my soil temperature this weekend and see where it's at. I know it is well above 40 and might be pushing 50. I might go ahead and try to seed some carrots and radishes this weekend just for grins, I have plenty of seed. I think the earliest I have every sown them before was mid March. Dutch, I might give your method of sowing carrots and radishes together a try...sounds like it works well.

There is about 5" thawed over the frozen so for *****s and giggles I scattered some radish, some lettuce and some carrot seed over the disturbed soil. Supposed to get showers tomorrow so maybe they will get watered in. Used to plant larkspur seed on the snowbank and let it melt the seed down onto the bed; maybe that will work for this. Even if it does we are still likely to get hard frosts here until in April; so that may or may not produce anything even if I get germination. Plenty of left over seed from last year to play with...

I sowed tons of brassicas inside. Broccoli, Cauliflower, and the new Hestia warm weather tolerant brussels sprouts. Tomorrow is 60F and I will be sowing spinach and mustard greens outdoors. Maybe try some lettuce and carrots too. It is on like donkey kong. Can't wait to start my sweet peppers.

We had a nice weekend here with highs in the 60s but very windy. I got 4 of the 6 new raised beds filled to the top with the garden mix I had delivered on Friday. The other two beds I just filled 1/2 full because they are planned for my new Asparagus plantings (24 Purple Passion and 24 Pacific Purple ordered from Nourse Farms) which won't be delivered until mid April. I think I will see if can get the scheduled delivery moved up a week. I will plant the gus 2" below current soil level and then add a couple inches of soil to the whole bed a couple times as they grow.

Soil temps in the new beds was 52 and in a couple other beds below the much they were 47. None of my established Asparagus has sprouted yet but I did see one horseradish sprout trying to poke thru the mulch. Garlic and Shallots all got fed with urea and are shooting up quick.

I sowed 2 8' rows of Cherry Bell and French Breakfast radishes along the sides of one of the new beds and watered them in. Our forecast is looking good...supposed to get down to 20s on Wednesday morning and then starting Friday, highs in the 60s and 70s thru mid March with no lows below 40. I will sow some carrots this week and more radishes each weekend until the middle of April. I'm going to move up my seed starting schedule by a week and start the Peppers tonight and the Tomatoes this weekend. Will start more Broccoli and Lettuce this weekend also. Will start the process of hardening off leeks and bunching onions tonight after giving them another haircut.

I planted the spinach, mustard greens, and went ahead with some lettuce and carrots under cover.

The soil in the raised bed was a little warmer the the ground. Hoping to see some germination in a few weeks.

I also tried some direct sow broccoli, just for the heck of it, with the weather the way it is.

Here is my main garlic bed, 600+ German Red. New growth started.

Never bother to mulch the bed. Just some dry leaves from the trees. Do you guys think it is time to put down some fertilizer?

One week past. Here are the same garlic bed:

Looks nice, how do you weed that? Will you apply more mulch? You must really love garlic.

My garlic is perking up nicely.

I just hand weed. The big weed problem is Star of Bethlehem. There are plenty.

I have some shred leaves/wood chips. I'll put on some when weather gets hot, like late May or so.

Garlic is the easiest one to grow. Deer never bothers them. Deer even yank out my onions before. Also I do not want to deal with starting seeds for leeks and onions. I may try them if I get time.

If we do end up getting freezing temps again(looks like we will), will the new garlic sprouts be ok? Would it hurt to cover them?

No they'll be fine even with a hard freeze.. it would have to be pretty extreme to phase the garlic.

I think the new growth can take to 20s F without any damages. Then some yellow tips when colder.

Ok - thanks! I looove garlic, so I would hate for something to happen to them now.

Yes worst case if the temps drop below the low 20's you may get some yellow tips, but they would still be fine. Fear not for your garlic. If you have heavy mulch keeping the soil wet I would remove it, IMHO. Rotting due to wet soil is a bigger concern.

Ok good. Yeah I removed the mulch about a week ago.

Chris relax. Garlic is one of the more fool proof garden vegetables you can grow. Drainage is the most important consideration at this time of the year. Also early weeding. Do not let the weeds get ahead of your garlic, but that is for eventual bulb size. Hardiness is not an issue, IMO, not even for the Creoles and other southern varieties, although they do not do so well in the more variable northern day-lengths during their active periods. I really expect that they have different day-length requirements from the northern hardnecks, sorta on the order that different onions have different day-length requirements.

Only about 40 of the 65 cloves or so I planted came up. I wonder if I should try pulling aside some of the light layer of mulch out there but it will become weed heaven. 40 bulbs isn't too bad but 65 would be nicer. Neither is enough for a whole year of course but I don't have that kind of space... or time.

Some softneck volunteers coming up, I planted some Home Depot cloves my first year, they keep coming back but not producing anything worthwhile to harvest. I think I will just eat the greens this year.

I think squirrels may have gotten to some of mine

One of my garlic bed looks still dormant. I planted about 200 German Red, and I only see some tiny sprouts. My main garlic with the same German Red has put out about 5" top growth, 4th leaves. They were planted about one or two weeks apart.

I think my garlic bed just wakes up late. Your is probably the same. It is still early. I figure my early garlic is sloping to the East and is warmer than the late garlic bed.

Peter - try putting chicken wire or some other type of cheap fencing over your new garlic plantings in the fall to keep the squirrels from digging them up while burying their nuts. It also helps to keep the mulch in place. I pull the fencing off in the spring when the garlic starts growing and the squirrels don't bother it I guess because they didn't bury any nuts there in the fall. Moles did in some of my garlic by tunneling under them causing the seed cloves to drop down too far so I need to get them under control this year.

I planted 36 shallot bulbs last October (18 red and 18 Dutch Yellow). All 18 of the red are growing great, but only about half of the Dutch Yellow made it thru the winter and of the ones that did most are not looking nearly as healthy as the reds. I just got back from picking up a pound of red shallots from the local Chinese market to replace the yellows which is the same place I got the reds last fall. Can't beat $1.49lb!

Yes I will try that next year, thanks.

I planted shallots from seed direct sow. I was told this works, and Johnny's recommends it. I am not sure I understand this instruction though -

"Direct seed in early to mid spring (or in late summer to fall in areas where onions are seeded then) 1/2- 3/4" apart in a 2-4" wide band, 50 seeds/ft., 1/2" deep, rows 10-18" apart. Sown at this rate, from most seeds a single shallot will form; clusters will form if sown more thinly."

It seems like it is basically telling me to dump them in. Don't I need to thin them? 1/2" spacing both ways in a 4" band is going to be a solid mat of shallots.

Thankfully they are off to a nice and early start.

The chicken wire is a very good suggestion. I get squirrels digging in newly worked and/or planted beds quite regularly. I should have thought of the chicken wire before this. Thanks, for the reminder.

Peter I suspect that if the newly planted shallots actual divide into clusters the individual size of each bulb in the cluster is likely to be much smaller which would be fine if all you mean to do is grow more seed stock for next year, but for culinary use, you probably want the bigger size.

Shallots still haven't come up. Hmm...

Music Garlic growing kind of slow but not bad for this time of year!

I should probably rake away the mulch, but it will become a bed of weeds.

Looks good. I did not put on mulch at all. I just need to pull the weeds.

Music has large cloves, so no wonder the blades are so thick. Hope they grow to large bulbs.