I see shoots from all of mine that seem to have wintered real well. I will know better in a week or so when the snow is gone and the ground is finally thawed.

Crappies bite here all year around. :-) Season is never closed for them either, but our possession limit is 10. I gotta agree that spider rigging looks a lot like cheating to me, too. I haven't bought or seined a minnow for crappies for something like the last decade. Plastics with 1/32 oz jigs on 4# UL do it for me, and I can keep my kit right in the back seat of my car. It took a couple of us a while to learn them, but the last few years we average way over 5 an hour, and since we catch and release here in the Metro, we have gotten into some amazing smack downs! (Both open water and back when we did it also through the ice.) Nothing like throwing back a limit to or from the grocery store.... LOL

Walleyes, pike, both species of bass and muskies are closed now. Walleyes and pike will open about Mother's Day. Bass a bit later and muskies even later still. We have been taking them and carp on the crappie tackle pretty regularly, though, even when the season is closed. They all come out well before walleye or bass openers. Of course they all go back, but they would have with us anyway. We don't target them but they still come to us. Everything eats tiny a lot.

Catfish are also open but it wont be until after ice our that they move up out of the deep winter holes. We have channels and flatheads and several types of bullheads but no blues this far north. The real exotic that has a brief open season are the sturgeons. They are open in the border waters but not inside the state. I got fishing water all around me, not more than 15-20 minutes in any direction.

As you can see I got a double dose of spring fever this year.

Dutch - Our spring is running behind here so I don't have much spring fever right now. I have a fishing trip to the Ozarks with some buddies planed for April 14 weekend. We are hoping to both fish and hunt for morels but unless it warms up pretty soon the morels won't be up.

Spring is running behind here, too. Mid April would be really early for morels around here, more like the first week in May would be normal. I haven't done much mushroom hunting here in Minneapolis, but one sister thought to have me try something different - growing morels. ??? She sent me a kit for that; so we shall have to see what we shall see.

Ice is starting to open up along some of the crappie shores I fish. Just about the next nice day with no wind I intend to see if there is anything working the edges of the ice pack as it recedes. A couple of these places are street and storm drains that run warmer water from underground, they always seem to be good early.

I am seeing a few signs of spring around here in the west metro of Minneapolis….but we were ice fishing for walleye and lake trout last weekend on the MN/CA border on well over 30" of ice, and my brother was driving out for panfishing with his pickup on a north metro lake last weekend on over 22" of very clear hard ice. The deteriorating landings are are only limiting factor now in the immediate west metro for ice fishing, but are still okay on south shore landings for access with ATVs, and now snowmobiles after our overnight new snowfall of about 4", with another 2-4" predicted for Monday. The 10 day looks cold with highs in the 30s and lows well below freezing until April 9th or so. I am done now, but believe that ice fishing will be a viable option for the foreseeable future.

Much of the river is open, including the mill race at Mill Ruins. Little jigs and UL last Wednesday netted a couple of sunnies, a 2# largemouth and 4 carp that must have gone 20#+. Needless to say that with out a net the carp were fun but weren't landed, not on 4# line. That was probably a grand total of about an hour to an hour and a half's fishing. Things are starting to move. Where the street drains are running the water will be warmer and it is about time for a lot of game fish to be moving up into those flows.

More snow cover overnight, looks like about 2" wet and heavy and should be gone pretty quickly. The construction crew left me some long boards once I take the pallets apart. So I will have walkways this year between my beds.

Looks like another 8+" of snow here in west metro, and ice fishing an option on lakes until mid April. Oh well maybe it will warm up quickly when this pattern finally breaks.

Hopefully about one more week and this crap breaks. They did get my house re-sided in the preceding couple of open weeks though. Now to pay for it! As of this evening still no snow emergency here in Minneapolis though.

Above freezing the last couple of days and the most recent snow cover has disappeared enough so that I can row my garlics again. They are growing even if the ground still isn't thawed. So far the biggest shoots are what I thought was a Creole. It also looks like my elephants will make it, although that jury is still out. They were so big already by the time winter hit that I was sure they would take it pretty hard.

Today down below freezing and staying there all day. Hopefully this and what they forecast will only be a dusting of snow on Sunday are the last gasp.

I got spring fever big time!

My spring fever is at a fever pitch too.

Yesterday morning there was a pickup truck out on the 1000 acre lake I live by. I saw a news story Friday morning mentioning that there is still almost 27" of ice on Lake Minnetonka as of late last week.

If anything we may have made rather than lost ice the last two nights with temperatures down into the upper single digits and low teens. The water bottle in my truck parked outside was frozen solid this morning.

Our deck still has well over a foot of really soft snow where the sun cannot reach it.

I just looked outside and a light snow if falling.

I'm getting ready to go home from work. One of those nightmare days when someone asks you how's it going and you say you have had better days when you were sick. Snow here, too. So far nothing sticking on the sidewalks or the streets, but a soft layer on my car.

I expect that some of the ice cover will start to disappear in the coming week. I saw some grebes on some open water and the Decorah eagles have hatched all three of their eggs this past week. Cute little buggers and both parents are feeding all three of them. Last year that pair raised all three to fledging; so these little guys have as good a chance as it gets for eaglets. There is a very good camera coverage of that nest just google 'Decorah eagle cam'. That's Decorah in NE Iowa.

Spring is finally here:

Mixed varieties. Look weak, not sure if weak seed stock or the soil.

All German Red.

Left two rows are Music, rest is German Red.

Left three rows are German Red, right four rows are Music. For some reason, I lost half of the row on the left.

Closed up of the Music in the 3rd photo.

They don't look so bad to me. It is still very early. Music looks real good in the closeup. Now is also the time for the first feeding. Right now my emerging garlics are all under about 15" of new snow and its snowing again!

Yes, the Music are definitely the best. Hope I can grow a bigger crop this year. Most of my seed stocks are still on the small side. I'm still in the building stage.

I also planted a bed of the tiny cloves the past week. They are the size of large bulbils. I hope they can grow to bigger round and to be planted next season. Weeding will continue to be the problem for the small plants.

Year in year out, Music is my most dependable garlic variety. Sometimes Japanese rivals it and often seems to come up heavier at first, but even with the scapes removed Music will often reach 4' in height. This year I spaced my garlic at about 8" instead of the 6" I have used in the past, hoping for greater size in all the varieties. A more normal spring would have made the comparison more meaningful... All I have this year were planted from full sized cloves last fall.

You soil must be very rich to get 4' or taller. Or my seed garlic still on the small size. They are about 2" diameter, and no more than 2.5" the largest.

I've looked at some of the garlic plant pictures posted over the internet. Some show the robust growth between the leaf nodes.

But most of my plants are like this:

I figure the soil is not rich enough for the plants to continue to grow? I normally just fertilize once and always slow release organic, not the fast acting chemical fertilizer. The soil is just somehow aged garden soil, not like the garlic farm soil, fully mixed with animal manure etc. Maybe that is the way to go to grow large garlic?

Hi Red,

I put coir, compost, Milorganite and composted cowmanure and some lime in the beds I make in early fall something like about a month before I plan to put down the cloves. I have fertilized already this spring, and this year I am building a compost, coir, leaves mulch. All look good except Xian. This is the second year in a row that it has flopped; so I think that is it! I have mulched much in the past. So we will see how that all turns out.

Below are pictures I took this morning. None of my beds are really big but except for the Xian I have a pretty decent stand.

The so called Mexican Purple ?? is a grocery store hard neck variety that had nice bulbs and few but huge cloves. So far it has been the most robust of any I have in this year. I planted more Music than any thing else, because it is my favorite.

If one is looking for coir, try Amazon.com. I have quite a bit coming from them. The way I am set up I get free shipping, too. But watch your prices, sometimes local pet shops will be cheaper. Look for reptile bedding. It comes in bricks.

You really pamper your soil. I wish I can do it. It is hard with the size I get.

Fertilized last week and received good rain after that. I've seen the garlic put on some good growth. Most of them have 6 leaves.

I have been working the same piece of quite sandy soil for nearly 40 years now; so in some respects I have to remake it for every crop. This is also a lifeline type of hobby for an old man; so rather than buying beers in a tavern I will spend my bit on the garden. Not that I overwork myself at it though. Garlic is my latest interest. I also have some small fruit trees but the lot is only 40x120 and the house takes up about 30x50 of that. Not all that much space to work with in the first place. Certainly not the same space you have to work on. What you have is obviously more than I could handle nor could I afford to treat it like I do with what little I have.

If this were a garlic farm, I would haul in some good compost and manure and improve the soil. That is a long-term investment since the improvement lasts years. But it is just too much as a hobby.

One has to be careful to limit one's hobbies to one's available time, energy and resources, something I have never quite learned in close to 70 years!

Here I'm looking at my old photos from previous seasons. My garlic season starts about early April. We are about 7-10 days late than last spring.

I started harvesting my garlic in early June last year. So it is a very short two month growing season. A longer growing season further North like yours should help. This may have helped to explain the tall garlic plants I showed from the web. Of course rich soil definitely helps.

We haven't even got ice out yet even on small lakes, and that is way late, more than 7-10 days IMO. We have been fishing open water generally in March in most recent past years. We just got ground thaw in the past week and a half. 2 weeks ago today we were in the middle of blizzard that eventually dropped us some 18 or 20 inches of snow. This week we go into the 70's. This is a very weird year, with a very long chilly spring, but not a hugely bitter winter either. The flowers on my peaches survived and will be opening this coming week most likely. So the pure cold was actually as mild as normal, just that we had no breaks with thaws and some very late spring blizzards.

We really never know just how long our frost free season is going to be. Sometimes killing frost comes right behind Labor Day in the fall and may or may not happen into May in the Spring. Sometimes ground thaw is in March and first killing frost is far into October. Thank heavens garlics and many other spring garden plants are very adaptable.

Wow redsun, your plants look great! We are neighbors but my garlic isn't anywhere near as far along as yours. Mine are probably between yours and Old Dutch's in size right now. Unfortunately I'm out of town on business for a few more weeks so I won't be able to fertilize until mid-May, unless I can convince my husband (not a gardener!) to go out there and do it for me. From what I can see from the pics he has sent, I did get probably 95% germination though!

Garlic has a very short growing season. You better fertilize now, or it is going to be late. Next year I'm going to fertilize a bit early. My harvest season is early to mid June.

This past week my Music, Japanese, and Mexican Purple have exploded in size and now are easily double the size of the Siberian, VietNamese Red, and my feral. I got the Music and the Mexican Purple mulched. I am not certain what the real name for my "Mexican Purple" is. I read that it is I generalized trade name for creoles coming out of Mexico. Others say most of it in the trade comes from China, but one nursery is advertising their "Mexican Purple" as a purple stripe. Last year I planted it real late and it did almost nothing. This year I planted it very early and it has wintered over beautifully and is growing like gang busters.

The bulbs I got were large, hard necks, with a small number of large cloves from grocery store bins. I know the buyer at the produce supplier who told me it was Mexican Purple, which I strongly suspect is a trade name. The plants are robust and the leaves very think and wide. While it is definitely a garlic, it reminded me of the noses that elephant garlic has went it first starts to come up. The foliage also does.

I forget what the clove wrappers looked like, but if I can get some more of this, I will check to see if it has the Creole red/burgundy clove wrappers.

You never know what this gardening hobby of ours will turn up.

My Music has really put on a burst in the past week. Siberian is taking over second place. The squirrels are burying nuts from the neighbor all over and have almost already cost me one variety of multiplier onions. The bunnies are eating the flowers off my tulips, but ... what is surviving is doing very well.

Music is going gangbusters. Already almost knee high.

Siberian is stretching too. I planted all on 8x8 grid this year and they seem to like the extra space.

At 8 inches apart they are bigger than they look at first glance and with 5 or 6 leaves already. The Music is seven going on eight. That one is going to be big this year. I direct sowed Copra seed and sowed it thick, and it is sprouting. Hopefully I will get sets out of that. I also picked up some seed trays with started Copra to augment my own seeding. That variety is sure taking a long time to die!

Dutch, how do you count the number of garlic leaves?

Up from the bottom. Most years in the past I haven't mulched but this year I am and that is covering some of the very lowest leaves, but i am not going to worry about that. For s**ts and giggles I am using a two level mulch this year. The lower 2" is a 50/50 mixture of coir and compost and that is covered by last fall's leaves, which I will run out of before I am done; so I am going to have end up using straw for the last of the top layer. The 8x8 spacing seems to be the garlics' liking, too.

Now if I can just keep the damn squirrels from burying the nuts my neighbors give them all over my garden. They have already dug out most of my multipliers doing that. The neighbors are nice enough folks and the tree rats are their direct pets, being empty-nesters; so population control has to be done quietly and secretly if at all.

Zone 6 Hudson Valley , NY. Heres my music and Siberian purple. Been growing this stock for many years with no problems. I was always told to add aged manure each fall helps the garlic grow well. I also add 12" of leaf mulch in the fall and never take take the mulch off.

Music

Siberian purple

Good luck with your crops! its a waiting game now for the scapes

Just now being in the garlic patch, I found some Music leaves already waist high (I stand just under 6'). The Music is almost twice as big already as any of my other garlics. Sun was wrong or I would post some pictures. Heavy fertilization and 8x8 spacing and the Music is loving it. All the others are looking robust too, except the Xian (not going to mention that one again!) Hope to have some pictures next week; going out of town this afternoon. All the garlics have been mulched this spring and they all seem to like it. None of them were mulched over winter. I have fertilized twice this spring with Milorganite and part of the mulch was compost with manure and coir, the rest last fall's leaves. With the two part mulch I doubt I will need to do much if any weeding.

Unless something terrible happens I am looking forward to the best garlic harvest I have ever had! I expect harvest late June into early July. Japanese probably the earliest and maybe some others as late as mid to late July. Tulips are done and should be ready to dig next week and set out on the racks to cure. They should be well done before I need those racks for garlic. I hope to get onions sets out of my Copra seed for next year, but that remains to be seen, both if and when they will need the racks, or maybe I will just dig an old window screen out of the basement and put them on that.

Dutch - it sounds like your garlic is doing much better than mine. I lost about 60% over the winter due to my failed experiment of storing my seed garlic in the fridge until planting. That's apparently not a good idea if you already have a sufficiently cold enough winter to vernalize them. Live and learn. I'll try to pick up some new seed stock this August for next year's crop.

I cut the first scapes yesterday.

Wow, great scapes! Mine are nowhere near that far along, although they have put on some good height in the last couple of weeks. I can't wait for scape pesto!

All my garlic is 36" tall or more. Bottom three leaves are dried on the early soft necks and all are scaping. Expect to harvest them in the next week or so. Porcelains and Korean Red are still growing and looking okay, but some already have one brown leaf at the bottom. Due to my move I planted later than ever, the last batch put into containers on 11/15, and the stems are bigger than I can remember. Sort of worried that the 600 mile move may have confused them and I am worried that they might not bulb up. One measly thing that I pulled up last week was not bulbed at all. Hoping for the best and that I will be able to keep growing these varieties I have tended for so many years.

All my varieties except the grocery store one are scaping, too. A couple of the Music are close to 4' tall, all the other varieties are significantly shorter. Even some of the Japanese are sending out those long top scapes, which that variety doesn't always do. Nice rain last night; so digging tulips is getting put off for a while. No drying lower leaves yet, although the grocery store garlic that came up so robustly is now looking sick, which really isn't surprising if it was in fact a Creole variety, considering how far north I am. If I get any kind of bulbing, I will hold that back to see if it adapts better next year, since sometimes it takes a couple or three years for a variety to settle into local conditions.

Baring some unforeseen catastrophe, I should be getting some real nice garlic in about a month or so. I expect 4 varieties to make real nice and one not so much.

BTW I am already harvesting some sweet banana peppers, jumping the gun a bit but some second fruits are already 5" long.

I have just started seeing a few scapes but none of my varieties are terribly tall - 2' at most, even Music. I wasn't home in the spring to fertilize as much as I probably should have so I'm not expecting much from this year's crop - but even small heads of homegrown are better than what I can buy in the store!