Garlic Harvest

The garlic was ready to harvest today.  We only planted 36 heads of Purple Italian this year.  We will use about 10 heads to make spaghetti sauce and use for cooking, then I will plant the rest for next year.  That should give me around 250 heads next year.

Garlic harvest and ready to be cured

 I tied them into 6 bundles of 6 heads with a long piece of binders twine.  I put a loop at the end of the twine and hang them from nails in the barn.  They will hang there for 3-4 weeks before they are ready.  To tell if they are ready, you cut the stem off of one and squeeze it to see if there is any liquid in it.  If there is, then they aren't ready yet.

The onions are also getting ready to harvest.  There were 12-18 that were ready today, so I pulled them and set them out to start curing.  Tomorrow I will put them on wire racks and hang them in the barn for about 30 days to cure for storage.  With how fast they grew this year, I'm tempted to plant again since we have 3-4 months of growing season left.

And one final surprise, our first mature pepper is ready.  That was kind of surprising considering that the plants aren't that big yet and they've only been in the ground for a month.  Being on so early, I'll wait until they turn yellow, orange, or red before harvesting.  They are a lot sweeter when they aren't green.

First mature pepper

The Garden is Growing

The garden is in full bloom.  We harvested the first zucchini today, about 7 inches long.  The garlic is almost ready to harvest.  Onions are bulbing up really nice.  Beans have the first flowers coming on.  Peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers all have fruit that should be ready in 2-3 weeks.  Here are some pictures of the garden.

Full Garden in the late afternoon

Peppers in the front two boxes, garlic & onions on the left, onions/lettuce/spinach in the center box

Beans in the front two boxes, carrots in the back, cucumbers and winter squash on the right

Winter squash climbing the trellis. Save space by growing vertically

Two 10x1 foot boxes for the tomatoes, zucchini in the foreground, crooked neck squash in the center

Buying Bulk Garlic

I've been trying to find suppliers to buy bulk garlic.  I never thought it would be so hard to order 600 pounds of garlic (125 pounds of 5 different varieties).  So far, every supplier I've contacted already has their bulbs reserved.  The sad part is I actually scaled down from 1 acre of planting to 1/2 acre in hopes of being able to procure enough to be able to sell some and keep enough to plant 1 acre next year.

My plan for the garlic crop is to plant 25 rows 220 feet long, which comes out to approximately 1/2 acre.  Each row is actually a 12 inch wide raised bed that I will plant 2 rows of garlic in, spaced 8 inches apart.  The garlic will be spaced 4 inches apart in each row.  That will give me 1320 plants per bed, for a total of 33,000 heads of garlic.  This would give me approximately 4,000 pounds of garlic for next year, allowing me to sell 3,000 pounds and keep 1,000 pounds to plant.

Now I just have to hope to find a supplier to make this a reality.

Full-time Farming

I've been thinking about it on and off for months, but recently I can't stop thinking about full-time farming.  I'm not really interested in animals, at least not with my regular full time job, but would really like to grow vegetables.  Actually, not vegetables, just one vegetable, garlic.  After doing a lot of research into costs, yields, market prices, and markets, I think in this area I can expect a net income of $4/pound with a yield of 7000 - 10,000 pounds per acre.  The cost for the seed for 1 acre is around $2500 - $5000.  After adding in the cost of diesel, a used set of disc harrows, and hay for mulch, my expected profit is around $23,000 - $32,500/acre.  There are other costs yet to figure in, like transportation to/from the farm, etc., but there is still a lot of profit to be made.

I'm looking at 7 acres of land about 20 miles from here.  The goal would be to work up to 2 acre plots of garlic with a 2 year rotation before planting any one field again and planting nitrogen rich cover crops in the off years.  With a potential profit of $50,000 - $60,000 a year from 2 acres, I could soon be down the path of becoming a full-time farmer.  I would also like to put in some berry plants to add some additional income or even put some of the profits into a small orchard.

The beef farmer down the road sells to a couple of large restaurants in Pittsburgh, so I am going to talk with him about potentially getting my garlic into the same restaurants and thus cutting each of our shipping costs since we could ship in the same truck.  Besides selling to restaurants, we would sell at a couple of the farmers markets in the area and since our homestead is along a highway, we would put up a sign and sell out of the barn.

I am working on the business plan and financial breakdown for the first 3 years of operation.  If it all works out and I can grow garlic while still working my regular job for another couple of years, we could have our house + farm paid off in 2 years.  Then there is no reason not to be a full time farmer.

Salad Harvest

Now we are in full salad harvest mode.  Leaf lettuce, spinach salads everyday with radishes thrown in once in a while.  The lettuce has been loving the last week of 60 degree temps and drizzly days.  The taste is so much better than the previous week when it was in the 80s and 90s.  Although we found that by mixing the bitter lettuce leaves with the creamy, mild spinach, that they can balance each other out quite well.  Much better than throwing away baskets of lettuce because it is too bitter.

We seem to get about 4 weeks of quality lettuce from our plants before the seed stalk really takes over.   Once that happens, I pull the plants, add some compost topping and plant some new seeds, except for the heat of summer.

The onions, which I didn't think would make it through all the hard freezes, are the biggest I've ever seen grown in a square foot garden and are bigger than the commercial vegetable farmer's down the road.  His are the same size as my second crop, which I planted in mid-April.  I'm hoping to get some nice baseball sized onions, possibly a few bigger.  The plants are higher than my hip with a couple reaching for my chest.

The beans that made it through the frost really taking off with the healthiest plants being calf high already.  The 7 cucumbers look really good so far.  Hopefully they won't die off in July like the preceding years.  Zucchini and squash are huge already.