I finished the garlic planting this week after a busy three weeks of splitting apart heads, raised bed construction, tilling, and planting. In all, it took me 94.7 hours to accomplish everything. I started by recording data on individual clove weights and the relationship between individual cloves and the weight of the head for each of the main 4 varieties. I was mostly interested in figuring out the weight at which I should sort the cloves into "planters" and "rejects." There is a basic linear relationship between the size of the clove planted and the vigor and ultimate size of the next year's head, thus I wanted to find the sweet spot between maximizing the yield of the 2016 crop, while also minimizing the number of heads that are too small to sell as seed. Each head requires the same amount of labor once the clove is in the ground, regardless of size, so it pays to minimize wasted effort. I recorded the average mass of cloves planted last year, so I had a goal to target. For the Chesnok Red varieity, for instance, I found that if I only planted cloves larger than 5 grams, I could achieve an average clove mass of 8.5 grams. Thus, i sorted the cloves into two piles after I split each head.
These data also showed that there was a linear relationship between the weight of the head and the proportion of cloves in that head that were greater than 5 grams. For instance, a small head might have only 1 clove large enough to be a "planter" but a larger head might 90% "planters". This is useful, but I'm mostly interested in figuring out how much of the weight of each head is comprised of plantable clove weight.
This graph above is key for helping me to figure out a fair way to price seed garlic. The vast majority (if not all) seed garlic is sold by the pound at a simple flat rate. This is easy to understand, but as these data show, not all garlic heads are equal. The smaller the head, the smaller the cloves inside, no one wants to try to sell dinky garlic heads, so there should be a premium on larger heads. I imagine most folks just sort their heads into two groups using an arbitrary weight cutoff, but these data allow me the option to price individual heads differently based on their weight. Instead of selling based a simple weight, I could sell based on the proportion of plantable head weight using the formula (aka model) on the graph. I don't want to make things too complicated in my quest for fairness, but I think this differential pricing could work. It also allows me to sell some of the smaller heads without feeling like I'm ripping my customers off. This makes me happy because it gives me a market for garlic which might otherwise be very difficult to sell.
I have similar data and formulas for the other three varieties. In the end, of the 318.7 pounds that I started with (I did not count the TF mongrel variety which were all too small to plant), I put 190.9 pounds into the ground (we also reserved about 2 pounds of each variety to take pictures). This comes out to about 30 minutes of labor per pound. There is no doubt that I could have planted more quickly with more efficient equipment, but that kind of equipment costs money. I will need to do careful analysis to figure out if and when it makes sense to invest in better equipment. In the end, it may be better to just hire more labor and use the same relatively inefficient methods. I'm certainly in no hurry to take on debt for machinery.
I have similar data and formulas for the other three varieties. In the end, of the 318.7 pounds that I started with (I did not count the TF mongrel variety which were all too small to plant), I put 190.9 pounds into the ground (we also reserved about 2 pounds of each variety to take pictures). This comes out to about 30 minutes of labor per pound. There is no doubt that I could have planted more quickly with more efficient equipment, but that kind of equipment costs money. I will need to do careful analysis to figure out if and when it makes sense to invest in better equipment. In the end, it may be better to just hire more labor and use the same relatively inefficient methods. I'm certainly in no hurry to take on debt for machinery.
I've gone back and forth on all sorts of questions regarding whether and how to mulch or not to mulch the garlic beds. For this year, I decided on trying out a cover crop based mulch by planting oats on several of the rows. The idea is that the oats will sprout and grow in the fall to create a thick carpet and then winter kill during a hard freeze. The picture above is of a row that I broadcast with oats in early October. So far, I'm not enthralled with the results. I think I need to seed much more densely for this to work the way I'm intending.
I'm also still dealing with extremely pernicious perennial grasses and horsetails. In the picture above, you can see a root clump that survived discing and tilling but quickly resprouted. I doubt that even thick straw mulching could do much to deal with these pests. I tried using the pigs as tillers this year in the garlic area, but they do as much tilling as I would have liked.
As an example of the lack of pig tilling power that I'm experiencing, here is the small paddock that the pigs have been contained to in the last month (they also have access to the barn and will be excluded from this area once the rains start in earnest). While they definitely hit this area hard, there are still lots of perennial grass clumps that they haven't rooted up. I do know that they always destroy the area where I feed them, so perhaps I will just move their daily feeding spot next year while I have them in the garlic planting area next year. I don't like denying them access to fresh pasture, but I do want to make the best use of pig-garlic synergies where they exist.
In the end, I'll likely be spending just as much time weeding the beds next year as I did this year, and a lot of that will be on my hands and knees pulling out perennial grasses. At least a late October check on this year's garlic shows a healthy clove with a vigorous root system. The cycle never stops.
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