It was Thursday, October 16, in the afternoon that we headed to the farm to plant the garlic. This was our best chance to get it planted since there was rain in the forecast for Friday and the weekend.
Despite having some frosty mornings this week our roses were still flowering.
This one had me confused as it was growing up through one of the hibiscus bushes. I had to take a close look to see what kind of blossoms they were. It is indeed a rose pretending to be a hibiscus. LOL!
Our pond is very low – the lowest we have seen it since it filled up in 2013.
Any rain that we get is very much needed and will be greatly appreciated.
I suspect that the fall colors were at peak, since the rain will likely bring down many of the leaves.
Some trees had already lost many of their leaves.
While others were putting on a grand display.
I spotted this apple that had dropped into the crotch in the tree and was being eaten by several types of bugs – yellow jackets, hornets, beetles, and flies all sharing the same fruit.
The sky was deep blue with fluffy clouds as my husband worked the soil where we would plant the garlic.
Rex (our rooster) and company showed up to help.
We set out our planting grid and it seemed in no time we had the garlic planted. 2 2/3 rows this size (338 bulbs). Less than last year but still enough for us and to share with family and friends. Our 2026 gardening season has begun.
Thanks for visiting.
Are you experiencing fall colors in part of the world?
Planting garlic this year was a smooth, uneventful task. We were keeping a close eye on the weather forecast during the first week of October, awaiting our best opportunity. The weather had turned cool and rain was in the forecast for several days last week into this week. Some days were all day rain events and others just passing showers. We saw an opening – last Wednesday and Thursday looked like they might be dry days with rain not forecast again until late in the day on Friday. When Wednesday was cool and overcast we decided to wait until Thursday. It was supposed to be a nicer day and waiting would give the ground a bit more time to dry out.
Thursday afternoon was perfect – not to hot, not to cold, mostly sunny and no mosquitoes. We were able to get our mere 320 cloves of garlic planted, mulched and fenced in about two hours time.
When we woke up to rain showers Friday morning I couldn’t have been more grateful that this job was finished.
I didn’t get many pictures of the planting process this year or go into a lot of detail in this post because most of you have been here in past years. I did however take a look back at all of my previous garlic planting posts and decided to share them here. If you/d like to learn more about the process or you’re curious about our history with garlic take a look – they go as far back as 2015, my first year of blogging.
If you are thinking about planting garlic and live in northern parts of the US or Canada, it’s time to plant. We planted ours this week.
The sky was blue and temperatures warm as we arrived at the farm Tuesday (October 11) afternoon to plant garlic. With rain in the forecast for Wednesday and temperatures cooling after that, Tuesday was our best opportunity to complete this task and it was a great day to “play in the dirt”.
We had about 330 cloves to plant. A bit more than last year but nowhere near the up to 8000 we have planted in previous years. I had split the bulbs into cloves the day before.
My husband had prepared the ground earlier in the day and laid out the line for our first row. The soil was like dust. I don’t ever remember it being so dry when we planted garlic. According to the US drought monitor map we are in a moderate drought.
Long time followers will likely remember how we use the lattice as a grid for planting our rows. We plant the spaces that have four across and leave empty the ones that have three across. Our lattice panels are 2 ft. by 8 ft. We can plant 64 cloves spaced 6 inches apart in each panel.
Ranger and Ruby ran around and played in the area as we worked. They are such good dogs.
It only took about an hour to get the planting done. I was surprised at how quickly we were finished. We decided to wait to mulch it hoping it would get a little rain first.
As we finished this task there was still time to enjoy some of this beautiful day. 🙂
Once again I’ve fallen behind in blogging. In this post I am sharing some of my activities from the week of November 1st – 7th. I plan to get another post, highlighting November 8th – 14th, up early next week. If all goes as planned I will be caught up. 🙂
Monday Nov 1 – I rendered beef suet into tallow. Suet is raw hard fat found around the loins and kidneys of the cow. For the last few years we have been buying our beef from a local farmer. we purchase a quarter of a cow at a time. Once the cow goes to the butcher or processor I have to call them and give them instructions for cutting and wrapping the meat. At this time I ask to have the suet included in our order. Most people who buy their meat this way to not want the suet so I always have to ask.
Rendering is the process of cleaning the suet. To do this I cut the suet into small pieces. It’s easiest to cut when cold or partially frozen. I then put it in my crock pot on high until it is completely melted.
Tuesday, Nov 2 – The suet was still in the melting process Monday when I was ready to go to bed so I just unplugged the crock pot and would finish it on Tuesday. After reheating it I strained the hot fat through 2 or 3 layers of paper towel. When the hot fat (tallow) cools it solidifies and becomes white. (picture above)
Tallow can be used for cooking. (The original McDonald’s french fries were cooked in tallow), candle making and is commonly used for soap making. If you read the ingredients on your store bought bar of soap you won’t see tallow as an ingredient but it is there. It is listed as sodium tallowate which is the result of combining sodium hydroxide (lye) with tallow.
Any solid that are left after rendering the suet are called cracklings. While some people eat these I never have. I decided to feed them to the chickens but my husband said next time don’t bother. When I asked if the chickens did not like them he told me that the chickens would have loved them but instead they were forced to stand by, dining only on bread crusts, as Ranger gobbled up the cracklings.
weighing the tallow
Wednesday, Nov 3 – I made soap. I wanted to use some of the tallow that I just rendered. The recipe I made was an oil combination of 40% coconut oil, 40% tallow and 20% olive oil. This is the first time I used this particular combination so I’ll try to remember to report how it turns out. It will be about 6 weeks before it is ready. I also added aloe to this batch.
Thursday Nov 4 – I did my dad’s grocery shopping. He orders his groceries online then I picked them up from the store. I then went to the dollar store and picked up a few things that he prefers to get from there. I delivered the groceries to dad and helped him with a few chores.
Friday Nov 5 – I took the boys out for their morning walk at the farm.
It was a beautiful fall morning. When we went out, around 10:00 A.M., the sun had melted the heavy frost that had blanket the area in the early morning hours. Our feet/shoes got wet as we tromped though the grass.
The breeze, if any, was gentle.
I observed moments when a single, random, tree would suddenly drop a shower of leaves.
It was and interesting phenomenon as the trees seemed to be taking turns.
Many leaves were still holding on. Fall is not over yet. 🙂
Saturday November 6 – My sister visited.
I still have one sister who lives near-by and we have been trying to block off some time, at least once a month, to spend together.
Last month when I visited her house I returned two bags of books that she had given me earlier this year. They had been passed onto her by our other sister and most she had not read yet. As I packed the books to return to her I stuck slips of paper into some, labeling them “must read” or “good read” so she will know where to start when she digs into this stack of books.
We also looked at different sewing patterns and she showed me some fabrics that she had purchased but wasn’t sure what she would make with them. “Take what you want” she said. There was one flowered print that caught my eye. We agreed that it was beautiful and needed to be made into something but neither of us could decide what. Even though I didn’t have a plan for it I decided to take that piece of fabric.
That fabric nagged at me for a couple of weeks. Because it was a large print I kept thinking that it needed to be turned into a large item of clothing. I searched for patterns for full length skirts and found a few simple ones but I don’t wear skirts very often and I don’t really know anyone who does.
Seemingly out of the blue I remembered the bathrobe pattern that I had. This fabric would make a lovely bathrobe. I bought a contrasting fabric for the trim and decided to make a bathrobe for my sister.
As I was making the robe I would try it on for size and in doing so discovered that as beautiful as this print is it looks horrible on me. Thankfully when my sister put it on it looked gorgeous – elegant, like I had imagined. ” I don’t know if I love it so much that I won’t want to wear it” she said, “or if I love it so much that I will wear it all the time”.
“Wear it all the time!” I told her. That would be the ultimate compliment.
In addition to giving her the robe, I showed her the projects I have planned to make as Christmas gifts. And we solved a few of the world’s problems over lunch. LOL!
Sunday Nov 7 – It was a perfect fall day for being outdoors and I started out by raking leaves.
The maple tree just off our deck had shed most of it’s leaves.
It took about an hour and eight trips with the wheelbarrow to remove the leaves from the front yard.
The maple that stands in front of our house was still holding many of her leaves.
As were many of the trees in the woods behind our home. The work is not finished yet.
After lunch I headed to the farm with my husband and the boys (dogs) to plant garlic. Normally we plant garlic around the middle of October. This year the ground has been too wet and muddy to plant, so we have been waiting for things to dry out a bit. We had decided earlier this year that growing garlic to sell is not in our future, so we were only going to grow enough for us and to be able to share some with family. We were able to get about 250 cloves planted, mulched and fenced (so the chickens couldn’t go digging them up). This is the smallest amount we have planted since we began growing garlic in 2013 and it was a breeze compared to years past. Now we can only pray that the weather stays warm enough for the garlic to get a start before the ground freezes. It will be spring before we know if this crop will survive.
When my husband told me that our son-in-law would be stopping by the farm to winterize his bee hive I decided to take along the gifts I made for Jackson and Addy. I had a hoped that the kids would be with him, but even if they weren’t he could take the gifts home for them – just in time for Addy’s (4th) birthday on Monday.
I hadn’t taken pictures of the super hero capes I made for the kids so my husband hung them from a plant hook and held them so I could get some photos.
Addy loves unicorns so one side of her cape was made from this unicorn fabric.
The capes are reversible so the other side of Addy’s was made with this brilliant yellow, orange and white tie-dye fabric.
I wasn’t sure what Jackson’s favorite thing is currently so I selected this superhero(ish) fabric for one side of his cape.
and this outer space type fabric for the other.
I wasn’t able to give the kids their gifts in person but I received a message from my son-in-law that the kids love the capes and that Addy was pretty insistent on wearing hers to bed. 🙂
If I made you a super hero cape what would you want on it?
It’s hard to believe that a whole year has passed since I last wrote about having the garlic planted. This is something that I blog about each year, mainly so I have a record of when we planted, how much we planted and how the weather was.
If you are curious about how we plant garlic you can check out this post from 2016.
Relying on the 7 day weather forecast it’s always a gamble, but I must say that our plan came together quite nicely this year. It was Wednesday, a week prior to planting, that I looked at the forecast and noted that we had a nice weekend coming up and temperatures were suppose to remain good through the following Wednesday, October, 14. Monday night was supposed to bring rain followed by dry days Tuesday and Wednesday.
It would have been prudent to plan our garlic planting for the weekend, as my husband suggested, but I really wanted to have the kids over for a picnic since I didn’t know when we would have the chance to do that again. We decided to roll the dice and wait to plant until Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday were prep days. On Monday My husband tilled up the ground where we were going to plant and I began splitting the seed bulbs into cloves. We had rain, as predicted, on Monday night, but Tuesday was warm and mostly sunny giving the ground a chance to dry up some. I finished splitting up the bulbs on Tuesday.
It was shortly after 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday when we made our way to the farm to begin planting our 2021 garlic crop and it was right around 5:30 when I said “WOO HOO! the garlic is planted,” followed by a short prayer “Lord please bless our efforts.”
In that 3 1/2 hours we planted nearly 1100 garlic cloves. The soil was moist and loose making for ease of planting, but having to continually chase chickens out of the area, so they didn’t dig up the planted garlic, slowed us down some. We also lost some time when I had to take the boys home after Ranger decided to run though a patch that we already had planted. After all the garlic was in the ground we enclosed the patch with a temporary plastic fence that will deter chickens and dogs and deer that may be wandering in the area.
Today I am even more grateful that we planted the garlic on Wednesday since we had rain again on Wednesday night and on and off on Thursday. Friday and Saturday were dry but the rain started again last night, continues on and off today, and is in the forecast for each day in the 7 day forecast.
It may seem odd but I have begun to think of garlic planting as the beginning of our growing season – almost like the New Year – something to be celebrated. Perhaps next year we’ll have champagne and fireworks. LOL.
For anyone who may be considering growing garlic next year, in northern parts of the world now is the time for planting. Garlic takes about nine months to grow and we try to plant about 6 weeks before the ground freezes. This gives the garlic time for it to establish roots. Ideally the garlic will not sprout green leaves before the freeze comes, but in past years when we have had this happen the garlic did not seem to be damaged by the leaves freezing.
Don't Eat It! Soap and Skin Care 