I had 130 garlic in a 4' X 10' X 8" high raised bed. I have been digging 6-10 a day, and have about half of them are now drying. These are music, Spanish roja and I think a German red, but can't recall now. It is really a mixed bag, some are pretty large, and a few are just pitiful. No rhyme or reason between music and the other two…some large and some small bulbs of all three varieties.

These were planted mid-October or so, well mulched, in a good prepared bed with a lot of home made compost, etc. I plan to shoot for 150 or so this fall, but will space them a bit further into another half of a bed. I am also going to experiment with planting some small cloves as well to see how they come out with proper care and hopefully good growing conditions.

I do wonder if the late spring is the reason for the more variable sizes. Also I noted all my plants were not near as tall as last year's crop which some visitors to my garden mistook for corn.

One bed of onions is now curing, and I am canning one of out of four 10' rows of my beets for pickles every other day now. I am going to start working up the beds for next year by deep burying my store of frozen fish guts from this past spring, along few frozen terminated yard squirrels, then topped with layers of compost .

My beet bed had three large raccoon that I had exterminated from the cabin yard last fall, which had mellowed underground over winter. It seemed to work wonders for vigor and size of my beets this year. I get the same results with plants in beds which all the fish guts I save from spearing and ice fishing all winter are buried in spring time. The indigenous gardeners were spot on by instructing to bury a fish under each planting.

I strongly suspect that a late spring here, resulted in a much shorter early growing season than we would normally have. IMO that is when the shoots put on their best growth and set the stage for full sized tops. It seems to me that around here we can consider garlic essentially a spring crop done or pretty close to done by the first official day of summer. My outstanding Music was the first mulched this spring by some time infact, and I expect that was probably the difference yielding larger bulbs than my other varieties.

I mix my beds as uniformly as I can and that seems to work out to a pretty uniform result, if bad uniformly bad, if good uniformly good. :-)