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  • From: "Glen Eco Farm" <glenecofarm AT planetcomm.net>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] planting garlic
  • Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 21:39:09 -0400

I always chisel plow, then disc my ground to get a deeply tilled and well worked plot and lay out sets of three rows spaced a foot apart with my Farmall Cub tooled up with the rear mounted spring tooth harrow with all of the teeth removed but three. The beauty of this tool is that by moving teeth around I can make any row spacing I desire from 1' to 5 1/2'. Three rows spaced one foot apart gives me a bed two feet wide which tracks between the rear wheels spaced four feet apart. By running one side of the Cub on the track of its previous pass I get a two foot wide space between the beds.

In the past I have always crawled between the beds on hands and knees to plant the cloves by sticking them into the soft soil by hand, then running a hand push plow between the rows to cover. This is several hours work to plant around 3000 cloves. This year I plan to avoid the hands and knees bit by trying a home made tool consisting of a 3 1/2' piece of series 40 one inch PVC pipe with a bevel on one end and the top half of a 1/2 gallon plastic soap jug stuffed neck first onto the other end making a funnel end. I will drop the cloves into the funnel as I walk down the rows. This tool has worked well for planting fava beans and sweet corn in the past. I have tried it on garlic in the past and ended up going back on hands and knees as it didn't really save that much time and I thought I had better precision with the old method. However it does save my knees and my blue jeans and I am going to try it again.

I haven't been mulching my garlic and generally it does fine in our mild Virginia winters, leaving open the option of running through in the spring with cultivators. This year I might mulch at least part of it just to see if it gives me some advantage.

Marlin Burkholder

----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Fellenz" <fellenz AT fltg.net>
To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2008 1:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] planting garlic


You could do the following:

> Work up the bed. For this quantity it may be easiest to use a
walk-behind rototiller
> Set a string line and cut a furrow using a Warren hoe or the side of
a onion hoe (just use something to cut a relatively narrow but several
inch deep furrow
> Set bulbs into furrow
> Use a rake or wide hoe to cover furrow
> Mulch heavily with straw

I've been doing it this way for the last few years and last year planted
~150lbs of garlic with this method.

Andy

Richard Robinson wrote:
Any recommendations for tools and techniques for planting large quantities of garlic? I hope to graduate from planting 50 cloves to more like 500, and wonder if there's a better way than hands and knees with a trowel. This will be a combination of softneck and stiffneck.

thanks.

--
Richard Robinson
http://www.nasw.org/users/rrobinson/

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