Winter is back? I wish you would keep the snow up there where it belongs! We are about to get clipped by the back side of the same storm but it won't amount to much or stick around for long. 78 degrees yesterday and snow today...what fun! I threw a double layer of Agribon 19 over a bed of lettuce last night because it is supposed to get down to 28 degrees tonight . Quite a battle it was fighting the 30 mph south winds. Now we have 30 mph north winds howling.

Your alliums are looking very good for this time of year and are probably enjoying the snow and moisture. It's hard to fathom the red onions overwintering up there. I'm going to throw some urea on all of my alliums this weekend and let Sunday's rain wash it in. I also have 25 broccoli plants of 2 varieties hardened off and ready to be planted out this weekend. The little guys are tough as nails now having endured hardening off this week with daily 25+ mph winds.

This has been a very early spring, but they have been inching earlier for a long time. Ice has been out of the City Park lakes now for just about 2 weeks. Compare that with the statement of the real estate agent we used in in 1979, when we moved to Minneapolis, who said ice out could be guaranteed for April 11, his birthday, no earlier and no later.

I have really come to respect how hardy garlic varieties really are over the past few years. ALWAYS PROVIDED THEY HAVE GOOD DRAINAGE especially going into and coming out of winter.

25 broccoli plants should provide a lot of table fare. I intend to have a few myself this year, but will deal with them later on (also napa cabbage). Do you also harvest the side shoots on broccoli, I normally prune them back to a single one which then provides another head, smaller than the first, but not by much. (What I love most is the sweet core of the stems, after the fibrous shell is peeled off! That is the filet mignon of the cole family.)

I normally protect my new transplants with coffee cans, protection both against the weather and cutworms. My mother back on the farm used drainage tiles that washed out of the draw in the bottoms of the farm land. I have a few I salvaged from when they sold the farm. Coffee cans work as well for me. I drink a lot of coffee so having enough cans really isn't a problem!

It seems to me that our winter storms and the summer ones have gotten much bigger than they used to be. I don't remember any that spanned from Kansas to central Minnesota in my boyhood. We did get some duzzies come down out of Canada, but our current weather is definitely running in different and much wider patterns than it did 40 - 50 years ago. This time we are actually north of the worst of this winter storm, only getting a touch which should be gone in another day or two.

I am especially interested in my one garlic bed "that wouldn't go dormant" from last summer. It is still single stemmed and stayed green not just last fall but all winter, and seems now to be picking up just where it left off.

That is interesting...maybe you discovered a biennial garlic! Let us know how it does over the summer.

The earliest type of broccoli I am growing is Early Dividend which is only 45 days. These will share a bed with the lettuce I mentioned earlier and after I have harvested the lettuce and the main broccoli heads I will clear the bed and plant some Maxibel bush beans there so probably won't get much for side shoots. This same bed will then be planted in Garlic in the fall. The other broccoli (Bay Meadows/60 dtm) will be able to stay a little longer and I will cut some side shoots until the summer heat diminishes the quality and then plant some cukes and summer squash in that bed followed by fall garlic. I also have some Green Magic broccoli that is 3 weeks along that will be planted out in a couple weeks. It does better in the heat than most types.

Funny you mentioned the washed out drain tiles. I have about 30 ft of drain tile that washed out of the farmland to the east that is stuck in the creek that runs thru my property. Never had a thought of using it for something useful but I would like to get it out of the creek.

My folks farm in NW Iowa was so tiled out, that when a tile broke on the top of the highest hill in the place, a cattail swamp quickly established itself there.

About the garlic: IIRC this is a hardneck variety that was stored warm and never vernalized and then planted late spring/very early summer. It sprouted right away, too. I remember having read that Chinese solo garlic is actually a technique for growing outsized rounds rather than an actual single clove garlic. If so, I would like to figure that one out just for the kick of it. Granted that there might be some difference in how various varieties perform under that technique.

I have had cloves just plain refuse to grow more than a single unit when late planted in the spring, but I certainly thought this bed would go dormant in the fall but it didn't. I will be planting another bed this year once we get into June, maybe with more than one variety this year, depending on what develops in this bed. If I remember the variety correctly, it should definitely be showing some sort of scape development by the beginning of June, and hopefully some very nice sized bulbs later on.

The problem of course is committing that much space for that long to that small amount of production.

BTW I consider most of the alliums to be perennials, with a bulbing juvenile phase and a dividing root adult phase that also blooms or scapes. For garlics the bulbil/round year is the juvenile. For onions the bulbs would be the juvenile. Multiplying onions would be a perpetual juvenile, and the cloved garlics would be a perpetual adult perennial. The Chinese solos (my guess) would be a reversion from a planted adult clove to a juvenile round. I have seen that kind of reversion, just no where near as dramatic; certainly no where good enough to be commercial.