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fall garden

How to Plant Your Home Garden Garlic

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In the Southern U.S., we plant garlic in the fall, and the best garlics for our relatively mild winters are the soft-neck garlics. These are also the ones that can be braided, if the leaves are left on at harvest.

Regardless of the garlic you choose to grow, it helps to take time to prepare the planting space for the crop. As always, add more compost to the bed. Mixing in some organic fertilizer, following package directions, is usually also a good idea.

To plant, separate a head of garlic into cloves, leaving the papery wrappings on the cloves.  Lay the cloves out on the prepared planting space in either the rows or the grid pattern that you choose to have them grow in. Make sure the cloves are spaced at least four inches apart. Five or six inches space between cloves would not be too much.

Then, push each clove down into the soil, pointy-end up, so that the tip of the clove is about an inch or inch-and-a-half below the surface.  Smooth over the top of the bed to cover the cloves, then water them well enough to settle the soil around them.

 Why not plant hard-neck garlics? The hard-necked garlics that form beautiful, curved scapes (flower-and-seed heads) in late spring, sometimes featured in magazine photos, do not always produce good heads of garlic in Southern gardens.

A Southern-grown hard-neck garlic
Hard-neck garlics grown in the South do not always form up well

Some years, of course, they do just fine.

Other years, the single clove that is planted, instead of forming a head of equal-sized cloves, will expand to become one giant clove (golf-ball size!) that has several tiny cloves formed around it, as in the nearby picture. The tiny ones don’t all come out of the ground when the “head” of garlic is pulled up in June, and those sometimes will grow into a head of garlic in a year or two.  Growing hard-neck garlic in the South is a bit of a different experience.

 

Where do I find garlic for planting?  Soft-neck garlics are usually the ones sold in grocery stores, in the produce section. If you buy an organically-grown head of garlic, it won’t have been treated with chemicals that prevent sprouting, and you can use cloves from that head of garlic for planting.

You can also order specific varieties of garlic from seed catalogs. A quarter pound of garlic may be the smallest order you can make, and that can be too much for a small garden. If you order garlic for planting, you might want to first find a gardening friend or two to share with!

This year, I ordered a Creole garlic variety, Ajo Rojo, and I will be sharing cloves with several friends. The Creole garlics are supposed to be among the soft-neck types most suited to very warm winters.

 

Fire Ants in the Garden – Organic Control

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No gardener wants to encounter fire ants in the garden, but sometimes we find that they have moved in, unwanted. Getting rid of these pain-inflicting invaders can take some persistence, but options for organic control do exist. Knowing a little about the biology of these ants can help a gardener plan a successful counter-attack.

Flattened fire ant mound with deer hoof print in the middle.
Flattened fire ant “mound” shows deer hoof print. PHOTO/Amygwh

Fire ants do not tolerate freezing weather very well. If you treat a fire ant mound in fall, even if the whole mound isn’t dead within a few weeks, enough workers can be killed that the rest of the colony doesn’t survive the winter.

In spring and fall, too, most of the ants in a colony will be closer to the surface, so that a mound drench type of product has a good chance of reaching all of them.

In other words, both fall and spring are when organic controls are more likely to work well. Killing off smaller colonies in fall will also reduce the number of new colonies next spring, when mated queens that survived the winter will fly off to start new colonies.

The very first control to try, though, doesn’t use any products at all. On a cool day after a rain (when more ants are nearer the surface), pour a few gallons of boiling water on the mound, starting by circling the mound a foot or so away and then pouring the rest right on the mound. If this doesn’t kill the whole colony, move on to “Plan B”, a purchased mound-drench or a bait. (NOTE: Boiling hot water can burn people when accidentally spilled, and it will also kill plants near the mound it is being poured on. Please handle boiling water carefully, and do not use it near trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs, or other desired plants.)

Another option is called “bucketing”. You gather up a few buckets, dust the inside with talcum powder or corn starch (to keep the ants in), and on a cool morning dig quickly into the mound, dumping shovels full of dirt into your buckets. Dig deep enough to find the bottom of the mound. Add a generous squirt of dish soap to each bucket, and add water to drown the ants. This works on small mounds, but not on old, deep colonies.

Organic-approved products for killing fire ants typically contain either d-Limonene (from orange oil) or a spinosad compound (from special bacteria) as their active ingredients.

One organic produce that contains d-Limonene, to be used as a drench, is Orange Guard Fire Ant Control. The d-Limonene products have worked pretty well in our area community gardens.

An organic product for fire ant control that uses spinosad as the active ingredient is Captain Jack’s Dead Bug Brew by Bonide. Instructions for using it as a mound drench are pretty far down the label, but they are there.

Whatever product you choose, be sure to follow package directions carefully.

Remember to NOT disturb a mound in any way before using a product on or around the mound. If the ants are disturbed, they go into “defense mode”; a whole lot of ants will boil up out of the mound where they can’t be reached by a drench.

Fire ants are not easy to eradicate, and new colonies will continue to move in from surrounding areas if they can, even when old colonies are killed off. It is their way.

However, gardeners can be persistent, too. Knowing the best times to work on the mounds for best effect helps keep our gardens fire-ant free.

Bulbs for Southern Gardens – Fall Flowering

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I received in the mail this week a great little reminder that this is the time to plant fall-flowering bulbs. The reminder was in the form of a cute little catalog from Harvesting History. The catalog is small enough to not be overwhelming, and the pictures are large enough to let you know what the flowers really look like.

The first couple of pages are given over to fall flowering bulbs, and the list includes several colchicums such as the waterlily crocus and white autumn crocus, fall blooming Bella Donna lilies, and hardy cyclamen. These are all hardy to zone 9, which makes them good choices for Southern gardens. The catalog also includes saffron crocus, another fall flower, which I have been growing in my zone 7b garden for many years.

Saffron crocus flowers in the fall
Flower of the saffron crocus, a fall flowering bulb (actually a corm instead of a true bulb).

For me, saffron crocus reliably re-blooms year after year. It also multiplies enough that I have been able to share “extras” with friends. The saffron flowers  appear around Halloween, when other plants are shutting down and turning into masses of dead foliage. The big lavender-colored flowers are a welcome sight!

These flowers are also the source of the saffron used in cooking, that most of us can’t afford to buy at the store.

The parts used in cooking are the stigmas, the three, bright red, thread-like bits that are the female parts inside each flower. To harvest, pick the stigmas by hand and dry them on a paper towel for a few days before storing.

I have, in the past, bought and planted bulbs (spring-flowering Angelique tulips – that were both beautiful and fragrant) that should work in zone 7 gardens, but my yard is enough “on the edge” that these died out over time. For my Southern garden, bulbs need to work in zone 8 or higher.

If you decide to add some fall-flowering bulbs to your garden this year, you can plant them now, and they should bloom within a month or two.

Control Cabbage Moths and Butterflies with Netting

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Many of the crops grown most successfully in fall are in the cabbage family. One funny thing I’ve learned as a gardener is that even the insects know that the collards, mustards, and radishes are more pungent than other crops in the group. The cabbage moths and cabbage white butterflies are less likely to lay eggs on them than on the milder members of the family: cabbages, pak choy, broccoli, and cauliflower.

Those milder flavored plants are going to need some protection. The moths and butterflies are not really the problem; it is their babies, the caterpillars, that eat huge holes in the leaves and leave slimy droppings (“frass”) all over the plants. The resultant mess is very unappetizing.

protect fall veggies from egg-laying moths and butterflies
fall veggies under netting

In gardens that are managed organically, you can use a product that contains Bt for caterpillars to take care of the problem, but the easier option is to cover the plants with some kind of mesh, netting, or row cover. This will keep the flying adults away from the plants. If the moths and butterflies can’t reach the plants to lay eggs, then the caterpillar problem will never occur!

The netting needs to be draped over a support system that is high enough that the net is held away from the plants, even as they grow larger. In the picture in this blog post, bird netting that I use in spring over my strawberry bed is draped over supports to protect some small kale and pak choy plants.

August-planted beans in flower.
Becky’s Aunt Joanie Beans, planted in early August.

It might not be the most lovely thing in a front-yard vegetable garden, but the support and netting will only be there for a couple of months. By the end of November, the plants won’t need the protection. The moths and butterflies will be gone, or close to gone, for the year.

Elsewhere in the garden, my patch of heirloom beans, my friend Becky’s Aunt Joanie Beans, is full of flowers. I even see a few tiny beans! So far, all is well.

 

 

 

 

Bean Leaf Rollers Return

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If the leaves of your late-planted beans are looking a little odd around the edges – with bits snipped and folded over – fear not!

Even though there is probably a caterpillar under each little snip-and-fold, they will not (usually!) do too much damage.

These caterpillars are the larvae (babies) of a Long Tailed Skipper butterfly, which is a Georgia native.

The snipped leaf-edges you can see in the pictures are in my garden right now. I pulled back one of the folded-over pieces to show you the caterpillar inside. When the little guy gets bigger, his head will be bright red. This is one more feature, besides the odd damage on the leaves, that makes this caterpillar easy to identify.

These come every year to my late-planted beans. The first year I saw them in abundance, though, was 2012. I made a little video, with the help of my younger son, to tell gardeners about them.

You can see it, too:

 

Planning a Small Fall Garden

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One of the great features of cool season vegetables, the ones that survive the frosts and freezes of fall and early winter here in the Southeastern US, is that they are not space-hogs.

Red Russian kale might get to be pretty big (two to three feet across and high), but it isn’t going to sprawl across ten feet of garden the way a tomato plant can, and it won’t tower so high — like corn or okra — that it casts shade on the whole rest of the garden.

Even better, a lot of the cool season crops are in the “cut-and-come-again” group of leafy greens. You can harvest some leaves, and the plants will keep producing. The plants might stop for a while during cold weather, but in the warm stretches between, they will continue to grow.

Here in my zone 7b garden, I have already started a few seeds for my fall garden. The first little batch of seeds includes some kale, collards, beets, winter radishes, and some green bunching onions. In a couple of weeks, I will start a little more of all of those, plus some lettuces.

What’s going into your fall garden?