Hi Dutch - good to hear from you...been awhile! I hope you have been well. Big storm coming in today with rain turning to freezing rain/sleet and then half a foot of snow on Saturday. I'd like to skip ahead a couple months and see the garlic start sprouting!

I dehydrated all of my rejected cloves from my planting stock back in October. I have a full quart jar of chips in the freezer and about 1.5 cups of powder already ground up in a coffee grinder. I also dehydrated a batch of onions that were starting to sprout and ground those as well. Both of the powders are SO much better than what you can get it the store.

I slice them before I dehydrate them as well and then spread them on the the 2 fruit leather trays I have for my dehydrator. If you don't have any leather trays then parchment paper should work as well. I dry them at 135F for around 36 hours.

I still have a couple dozen bulbs of Spanish Roja and Chesnok Red in the fridge crisper drawer to last me for fresh eating. They keep well in there until June when the new crop is done.

I planted 133 cloves in October. 14 Music, 28 Chesnok Red, 28 Spanish Roja, and 63 German White. I didn't get much top growth before I mulched them around mid November. Maybe 1" max on about half of them.

Hi Jack,

I actually had a tough December. I caught that damn drawn out cold at about the end of the first week and am just now feeling like I have finally shaken it. I was able to go to work; so that remained stable, but I pretty much had to put every thing else on hold. This thing just plain doesn't clear up quickly and it relapses real easy.

I am feeling better just in time for our January freeze. Below zero due more than once in the coming couple of weeks. OTOH if all it ever does is single digits below zero, it will actually be a mild winter for us. We have a nice snow cover, although we had some thawing days recently; so that is less than it was. Still maybe 6-8 inches with more possible in the near future. A good snow cover is about as good a mulch as one can get.

I was very pleased that all my garlics including most of the loose cloves were in very good shape this late into the winter. I got some very white garlic powder. No dehydrated cloves at all to start out with this year, all good plump white cloves. My dehydrator dried my chopped garlic down in less than a day. The slots in the trays were too large for how fine I chopped it, though; so a bit of waxed paper under worked quite well.

I held out my extra Music. Hopefully there is enough for some gifting and planting some around the tomato patch hoping to discourage the squirrels who love the tomatoes all of about two bites worth when just really red ripe.

BTW the easiest garlic I ever saw to peel was my Japanese (AKA Sakura), Nice big cloves, too. Most years the bulbs are nearly as big as Music and with only a similarly small number of very large cloves. Also very early. It didn't do so well last year, but it was still better for clove size than most of the rest of my hardnecks.

It is good to be back. Be cool,

I'm glad you are feeling better Dutch! I hate lingering colds! We didn't get the brunt of the storm at my house. Only a light glaze of freezing rain and the 4-5" of snow. Some areas to the north and west got as much as 1/2" of ice, lost power and had a lot of tree damage.

Sorry about the Viking loss yesterday. They sure didn't look like the same team that beat New Orleans. We are having a Chiefs watch party here today. It's about time to head out and fire up the smoker to make wings and various sausages.

I got the rest of my garlics except the Music finally powdered. I found a reference to about a 10 second microwave treatment that was supposed to loosen that inner skin and that worked pretty well when coupled with a pair of thumb nails that actually need trimming. The openings on the shelves of my dehydrator had openings too large; so I used wax paper under the chopped, peeled cloves and it took just over a day to dry them down. I ended up with about an ounce and a half total... I also used a coffee mill. If it is any good that will be great, else that is a pile of work for very little.

I used to follow sports some, but I don't have any stock in any of those professional sports teams, and the relatives of mine who spent their lives on sports, were either business failures or ended up crippled; so I sorta lost interest.