Dodos Did It: Late October in Vermont

So I haven't been arting much as of late due to my studio being out of commission. I've been working up to finishing scraping wallpaper for a good 4 or more months now. Instead, this summer I focused much of my creative energy on my garden. Since summer is well gone now I've been thinking of what I'll be doing for the garden come spring.

This morning I decided to plant my garlic. I've never done garlic and last year I missed my chance by focusing too much energy on trying to find the perfect garlic to plant. This year I'm going another route all together and decided to just plant the cloves I have in my kitchen from the grocery store. What do I have to lose?

Josh and I have two big garden plots in the back yard and I have already decided where the garlic will go. The larger plot has an area by the green house that had peppers in it this last spring and summer. Since I can't use that space for peppers or tomatoes for another 3 years at least, I might as well put garlic in it.

Last year Josh and I built up small hills to plant in, this year I decided to level them out. I experienced some problems with the mounds and figured I'd try another method. I figure this will give me more flexibility when it comes to where and how I plant seed in the spring. For example, this fall with the garlic I want to plant a double row.

I marked out the area I'd plant in and dug out small holes with my spade. After reading that it is good to have a lot of organic material mixed with the soil for garlic, I was glad to see that the top part of the soil had lots of pine needles and leaves in it. This left the top part soft and I proceeded to dig a little into the harder earth underneath to give the bulbs some support.

Twenty holes for twenty garlic bulbs, perfect start to attempting garlic gardening. In went the garlic with the tip pointing up to the sky. I lightly patted down the softer earth on top. Since the winters are cold here in Vermont and the frozen ground will threaten to push out my bulbs I bedded the ground above the cloves with coffee chaff. (Coffee chaff is the light, airy husks that come off of coffee beans when roasted, we use it in the chicken coop, too.) And then on top of the chaff I added a layer of dried leaves (I attempted to mulch the leaves down with the push mower pretty unsuccessfully). Hopefully the leaves will keep the chaff from blowing away.