today's garden work

I've been visiting my parents for a couple days. Today I helped out with some garden work. It was a beautiful day for gardening!

- I took down "the annex", a small (about 10 x 15 ft) garden section that we created in the lawn next to their garden last year because they needed more room. They grew tomatoes, summer and winter squash here and it did great. I pulled out fence posts and stacked them under the porch, removed and rolled up the 5 foot tall plastic deer fence and saved it for next year with the posts under the porch, pulled up and disposed of the mostly decayed landscape fabric that they used to keep down the weeds, collected and stacked the bricks used to hold down the fabric and, finally, racked smooth the soil surface. The area would ready to be mowed with the rest of the lawn, except that LOTS of wild kale came up all over this new garden and my mom is still using that.

- I planted garlic. Earlier, I explained to my parents that its best if they plant their own garlic that they grew last year. Its the first year that they've gotten a really nice garlic harvest. My mom was disappointed at first to give up 7 or 8 heads. then when I told her it should be the biggest heads, she was crushed but complied. Last year I planted 40 cloves for them, they want to have 50 heads next year, so I we counted out the largest heads to give 50 cloves and I planted them. Before planting, I layered on a good amount of their homemade compost (yeah for homemade compost!!!) in two rows, turned it into the soil, then planted the cloves. I planted double rows of garlic in the two rows, staggering the cloves alternately, then smoothed over the soil. In the next few weeks, I'll cover it with salt marsh hay.