Yep, Better than a crocus...

Yep, Better than a crocus...

Remember back in mid-March when I posted a photo of tiny sprout and claimed it was better than a crocus?

Tonight I harvested the first handful of my garlic crop. I'm tickled. Aren't they beautiful? This is maybe a third of the crop. The rest looks like it still has some browning to do. Maybe I need to plant more next year.

Does anyone know - do you also eat the hard part that grows out the top?

Otherwise my garden is not doing all that great. I followed the advice of the Square Foot Gardener when I put my garden in. He claims to have figured out the magic formula for dirt, so you can just buy all the components at a garden center and instantly grow a stupendous garden. 'Cept it doesn't work. I followed his recipe to a tee - and everything is stunted and takes forever to get going. I'd blame it on the weather, except I biked past Wilmer's victory garden and where I have about eight inches of winter squash vine and a couple of blossums, he has a couple dozen eight inch long squash. Where I have a couple of golf-ball sized tomatoes on spindly bushes, he is growing great mounds of plants and I'm sure he has watermelon sized tomatoes about ready to ripen.

So I'm loading my boxes with compost every chance I get to build for next year. And the year after. I need to go raid the buggy lots around town and let that stuff mellow for some fertilizer in the fall.

Wendell Berry says you can't break stuff into it's component parts and think you can match the mystery of something as complex and wonderful as soil. I'm proving him right.

I've been a negligent blogger in recent weeks. Nobody seems to be complaining. Maybe it's the weather.