Market Farming

[Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>]

On Nov 17, 2008, at 8:40 PM, Richard Robinson wrote:

> My garlic is all mulched with bagged leaves, but I wonder how others do this, especially those of you who grow a hundred feet or more of row. And do large-scale commercial garlic farmers mulch, or do they grow where the ground never freezes? 
>
> Richard, curious in the zone 5/6 rural suburbs of Boston

Straw mulch (on about 1600 row feet, in my case). If no mulch is used, at this location repeated freeze-thaw cycles will heave the cloves out of the ground over the winter.

I expect large scale growers chop and spread the straw with machinery; I expect the machinery used to do this over large-scale strawberries would work fine for garlic. I spread it by hand.

-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 5 mostly
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale