I have only dug a few so far that met my standard of four mostly green leaves. Size for these are 2.5 - 2.75". The rest are getting close, perhaps a few more days to start digging, then every other day until all 570 are in. I am in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia at 2,600 feet elevation.

What variety do you plant? I have hopes that some of my Music will get close to those sizes. It is really husky this year.

Our ground wasn't even thawed this year until close to the end of April. You are really up in the sky. We are only 830' elevation here in Minneapolis and where I grew up in NW Iowa was about 1400.

There are times when I wish we had as long of a growing season as more southerly folks - but then we get a day like today when the actual temp may break a hundred and it feels like 110! Then I wish we were even farther north! Looks like 98 was about it today.

Our weather up here is ideal - cooler and drier than most coastal and mid-western plains. Our average high in July is only 82°F with nights around 60°F. I usually plant my garlic in the last week of October, leave the mulch on all year, and harvest in the first half of July.

My main crop is Music which averages 2.5" and some top 3". I also grow Russian Red and Estonian Red which are similar in size, just a smidgen smaller on average. This year I threw in a row (95) of a variety sold as Appalachian Red. There is such a variety here, a Rocambole, but I found the seller was not really sure what he was selling so I will not regrow it. Still it is sizing up well and will make good eating/canning stock.

I may add Killarney Red next year just to have more Rocamboles, or some legit Appalachian Red if I can find big bulbs. I did over plant a bit this year. Although I sell a 100 bulbs to a disabled friend and ex-grower, the remaining 470 bulbs are a bit much for just the two of us. I'll wind up giving more away this year.

I like Music a lot. I dug one to sample size. It is already 2" but the cloves are not yet much developed and none of the leaves have gone brown. So I am hoping for some real nice bulbs. I am starting to see some browning in the feral I collected from Iowa, which I am guessing is a rocambole, and a bit less but also starting in Siberian and VietNamese Red. It looks like Music will be my latest one this year and it has a while to go yet. I still have about a hundred to a hundred twenty plants to dig eventually, and there is just me; so I am a bit overplanted, too.

I pulled my last garlic plant last weekend. The harvest is better than last year, but not super great.

I got lazy and did not mulch. Then I got weed problems. This may have impacted the size. I get all various sizes, from 3" to many rounds. This season, I plan to mulch over winter and mulch again in early summer with straw.

I continued to have garlic rot problem from my heavy clay soil. I plan to dig (may double dig) my garlic bed and mix in more compost and old peat moss I have. Then fertilize at planting time. I did not feed my plants much.

This is still a development year for me. I cared more about quantify than quality. From now on, I can focus more on the quality side and grow larger heads. I won't open new beds for more garlic.

Varieties are not important to me any more. Over the years, most of my varieties have gotten mixed up. Only the best ones survived by now. They are mostly German Red and Music. Some are German White. Purple stripes got lost. Softneck produced small heads and I may not grow them more.

I normally do little mulching myself, but this year I stumbled across a winning spring combination: first about a 2 inch layer of a 50/50 mixture of expanded coir and sterile compost - then once that has settled and the plants have grown a bit more another two inches of leaves (I expect chopped straw would work as well). I literally did not have one weed in my garlic beds this year. That was a real time saver, and my back, too.

I dug my Music today, and it is nice. Averaging well over 2" per bulb with some up to almost 2 3/4".

I also dug Siberian today, and it was much smaller, as were my VietNamese Red, Aunt Frieda's feral, Japanese, and the grocery store Mexican. Not enough size to make pictures to be proud of, all of them almost an inch in diameter smaller on average than the Music. All of these were planted in late September as opposed to Music in early October. The big difference IMO is the very late spring or all of them would have had a much earlier and longer spring growing season (and probably bigger bulbs all around). I will plant everything in October this fall.

Topsets have all fallen over so it is time to get them out now, too, but it is starting to rain again. Such few elephants as I have will also have to come out.

Tomatoes are starting to ripen and this year I am getting to them ahead of the squirrels!

All the garlics are now dug and on the curing racks. So I went down to Bachmann's here in Minneapolis, to see what they had left. I got 10 nice big peppers already in fruit for $1 each. They have now been planted back where the garlics and tulips had been dug out. These are all bells, yellow and green. I would have preferred bananas or Anaheims, but at this time of the year, beggars can't be choosers. So far I have been able to save tomatoes from the squirrels at least off the 4th of July plants. So far there are a couple dozen finishing off on the window sill. And I have been harvesting banana peppers for some three weeks now, too.

I think I almost melted down out there this afternoon! Heat index over a hundred and dew point well into the 70's. And tonight heavy rain with flash flood warnings out all over s and sw Minnesota. We got us monsoon.

I pulled my seed onions today and it looks like I should have a decent set of Copra sets for next spring. I planted them thick and pretty much ignored them all season so far.

After the harvest:

The bare garlic beds got to me; so I planted white and yellow turnips, Michihili Chinese Cabbage, daikons, Flakkee carrots, Guardian bunching onions, and took a gamble putting in a short row each of Burpee's Butterbush butternut squash and Minnesota Midget muskmelon. It will take a late autumn to get much out of either of the other two, but they are both about as short season as it gets for those kinds of plants. We shall see I suppose.

I had a different kind of treat. Radish seed pods. Some got overlooked and bolted unnoticed until I was pulling some weeds today. The crisp green unripe radish seed pods are delicious. There are varieties specifically for this purpose, but I find that bolting radish stems are also very good either raw or steamed before they actually flower and they all produce edible seed pods.

I might add a row or two of spinach in my bare garlic or onion bed…maybe some radishes. Some people seem to have luck with late summer/fall radishes, but I have not pulled that off yet. It is fun to experiment anyways.

My harvest was pretty sad this year due to the fact that I wasn't home all spring - DH was in charge of the garden and "forgot" to fertilize. Oy. I got nice scapes, but my bulbs were all under 2", very puny. Hopefully I can remedy that this year. I also think I planted too densely - I did 7 rows of 8 plants in a 4x4 bed. I think I'll try 6 rows of 7 plants this time and see if that helps.

I'm prepping my beds now to get the garlic in the ground asap. I will be planting Music, German Giant and Russian Red for the third time, but I plan to dump the Russian Red if it doesn't improve next year - it has been my worst performer by far. I have three 4x4 beds to devote to garlic so 120ish plants - I'll try for half Music and a quarter of each of the other two, if I have sufficient seed stock for that.

I finally was able to work my garlic beds last week. Whenever I had the time this fall, it was raining. I then planted right away. And then the squirrels showed up; so I covered the two beds with chicken wire and that seems to have stopped the digging.

Jack, I got a few more than you. Pretty much the same varieties as last year, and real heavy on the Music, since that one did so well last year. New for me is Maiskij, a Turban. Music, Japanese and Maiskij are 8x8. The cloves for the rest are all smaller and those got 6x6. There are two 3' beds, one about 16' and the other about 20'.

LOL I say 8x8 and 6x6, but what I really use is my spread out hand from tip of thumb to tip of pinkie and from tip of thumb to tip of index finger. I got heavy hands and my fingers don't curl back so that works pretty good, once I got the spread measured.

I added a couple of new tulips, too. One of them is supposed to get 36" tall, hopefully putting it above whatever is snipping my flowers just as they open up and color up nice and red. The other is supposed to be close to that. IIRC they are what are called French or cutting tulips and are tetraploids. Those are the same long stem tulips one sees in the florist shops, and they don't normally get offered to gardeners. Hopefully they won't blow over in a storm, but then my backyard is pretty well sheltered on all sides.

I finished up my planting this morning - I ended up with 50 Music, 35 German Giant and 25 Russian. I gave the Russian a little more room in the hope that they might do better that way, but we shall see. I worked in a good bit of manure this year and planted a little deeper than last year as well.

I just finished with all planting today too. Close to 300 Kostyn’s Red Russian, 135 of Music, 30 of Chesnok Red, 45 of Metechi, 33 of Spanish Roja, 50 of Siberian and 3 of Phillips. All 8” spaced apart. I did not want to plant so much but have so much more to eat. Hopefully they all make it. Will cover with straw this weekend.

Getting psyched to plant!

I saw a few garlic sprouts over the weekend. Only a half dozen so far but I imagine most of them will be up in short order. We have some low 20s in our 15 day forecast so I'll try to get the garlic mulched next weekend. I think I timed it pretty well this year to avoid too much top growth in the fall.

Sounds like you hit it about right. We have low 20's and even lower in our forecast for the next couple of weeks with some day time highs that just barely make it into the low 30's. They are forecasting snow this week to the tune of half a dozen inches up in the NE of Minnesota. Thankfully that is hundreds of miles from here!

Dutch - it sure seems like the MN arrowhead gets more than their fair share of white stuff. We have 3 days in our forecast with snow chances too. It's too early for that here but not unheard of. At least 50% of the leaves are off the trees already. If not, a heavy wet snow could be as bad as an ice storm.

We just got back from the tip of the arrowhead near Grand Portage, MN. There was in fact about 5" of heavy snow overnight into Monday. Lows in the teens and highs in the 20s to low 30s are predicted for our full week of deer hunting staring Nov 10th. My garlic up there, planted around the fist week of October, had not poked through as of yesterday, but when digging around where a deer had walked through the bed I found a clove that was anchored by its root system and the tip was starting to green up a little.

Here near he twin cities my garlic planted at the end of September is poking through. The bed planted October 10th has not emerged, nor the bed planted in succession on October 15th. But judging from results up north, I am sure they are doing well enough. All beds are mulched with leaves.

Almost all of October was unseasonably cold in MN. If one knew this in advance all the garlic could have been planted late September. However most years that is likely a bit too early. Last year we had significant top growth still growing well into November.

The Arrowhead and UP of Michigan and the northern tier of Wisconsin all get more than their fair share of lake effect moisture, especially snow between Lakes Superior and Michigan.

Tbenjr - that's a nice drive up the north shore to Grand Portage! I've done it a few times and stopped at Lutsen to play golf once. I think I've got a couple golf balls somewhere in Lake Superior. LOL It looks like it is snowing pretty good up there again today.

I've deer hunted in Minnesota once with my brother's hunting party up near Lake of the Woods in the mid 90s. We drove up there in a snow storm and hunted in about a foot of fresh snow and -2 degrees opening morning!

Our deer season opens Saturday down here too. I usually just hunt on my property opening weekend so only a short 100 yard walk to my deer stand. I'll be joining some friends for a hunt in the Ozark mountains the second weekend. Now they are saying that we are supposed to have a low of 18F opening morning which may be the coldest I've ever seen it on opening day here.

It sounds like you have garlic planted all over the state with a wide range of planting dates. About how many did you plant in total?

I looked over my garlic bed last night and about 1/3 of it was up. I'll mulch it with shredded leaves this weekend if I'm not busy butchering a deer.

Lone Jack.

Our season in northern MN opened Nov. 3. We were there for it with our adult children for family deer camp. The main event of a week straight of hunting starts Nov. 10th.

I remember that particular deer season...actually I remember 2 particularly cold openers with below zero temps since 1989, one with only a few inches of snow, the other, like you mentioned with at least a foot of snow. I have detailed journals going back over 30 years of all my hunts, including weather conditions. Luckily the one year with a little snow and -4, I had a nice 8 point buck come in at about 7:20 AM which I dropped in his scrape. For some reason I didn't even have my pocket knife with me, so had to walk 2 miles one way back to the cabin, gut the deer and drag him. I was pretty warm after all that. The next day it was was melting and the temp got to 40f. Not all years have been very cold, however, if we have tagged out by the last weekend of the firearms deer season (3rd weekend of Nov), we are often able to go ice fishing or spearing on small lakes by then.

I planted about 30 garlic at our cabin in the Grand Portage State Forest, and 230 at home here in the Mpls area. I ended up with 160 from this past summers harvest, and had enough nice sized cloves to up my game. We love our garlic!

Interesting how the northwoods changed after it was clear cut. Before that it was caribou/moose. After it got opened up whitetails moved north and carried with them the parasite that is fatal to caribou and very nearly so for moose. Of course it has been over 100 years now; so traditions are different, too. Caribou in the climax growth and moose in the swamps originally with whitetails farther south living on the browse at the edges. Habitat change and the difference in response to common parasites.

BTW while that transition was happening up north, Iowa had been declared extirpated on both whitetails and prairie elk, which were the largest herbivores in Iowa until the 1850's. The whitetails in the 1890's and the elk in the 1870's. East of the Missouri and south of the Buffalo Ridge bison were rare. It wasn't until 1954 that Iowa reopened a whitetail season which was 2 days and shotgun slug only. Elk will most likely never be reintroduced.

Interesting OldDutch. When we lived and worked in Grand Portage in late 80s to late 90's moose were very plentiful. Thanks to the band members we ate a lot of moose meat in those days, to supplement our own venison. Deer and moose were both plentiful.

BTW it was cold this year. In the past week we had temps down to -5f two mornings, other lows were down around 0 to 8f. And there was just the right amount of snow. I saw deer and even got to watch 2 timber wolves upwind of me. My hunting buddy about a mile south of my position saw two members of the same pack. The two he saw would not cross his boot track. They were also howling a lot that morning all around us. In terms of deer we filled our tags, nothing particularly noteworthy, but excellent eating deer.

They just took our wolves off the endangered species list. I find it interesting that they are damned as the great deer killers when they number about 1/20 of the size of the black bear population in Minnesota. Studies in Pennsylvania and New York have proven that black bears are heavy predators especially of deer fawns and each, even the smallest, outweighs nearly any wolf you are going to find anywhere with a correspondingly larger belly to fill. Yet it is the wolf that is demonized. Of course at this time of the year the bears should be all denned up and out of sight. And bears don't howl either.

You are correct about the bears and their heavy predation on both deer and moose calves in the spring. We have never seen a bear during deer rifle season, but see them regularly during the early part of grouse season. We enjoy hunting in the same area as the wolves. In fact I much prefer them around to other human hunters, which thankfully we have never encountered in almost 30 years.

It is my opinion that wolves keep the mature deer heard up there in very good condition.

I did find one recently wolf killed deer remains this hunting season, which appeared to be a buck fawn, or a 1.5 year old small doe. These kills sites are great for viewing other wildlife enjoying the remains - including chickadees, pine martin, fisher, eagles, ravens, and fox. It is amazing to see and then be able to imagine what goes on at all hours out in the woods. I just got back home today, and already can't wait for next year.

BTW we used a good bit of garlic which I grew up there in many of our meals. We don't worry about trying to cover any of our scent, including any dietary considerations in that regard. We strictly try to play the wind because we have learned that no matter what is tried, you cannot ever hope to fool a whitetail's nose.