Earthblog

We didn’t know to snip the seed heads from some of the garlic we were growing, so about 50 of our garlic plants went to seed. As a result they didn’t form very big bulbs, which makes sense as they redirected a lot of energy to produce the seed heads. No matter—I’ve read you can plant the seeds, though it takes two years for them to produce garlic bulbs. We planted about half of these seeds this past fall, and we’ll plant the rest in a few months. Nothing goes wasted.

We planted two long rows of sunflowers for use in our wedding on our property this past summer. We thought we planted the seeds early enough, but as we made our walk down the aisle in late August, only one sunflower bloom had emerged. Then, a week after the wedding, the remaining 40 or so sunflowers all opened up. Timing is everything.

Looking back, we will remember 2010 as the Year of the Apple. When nearly everything else failed as a result of it also being The Year of the Grasshopper, we still harvested at least 100 usable gallons of apples, and composted about that many too. We were swimming in apples for two straight months. We tried our hand at making cider (about 4 gallons) and hard cider (about 5 gallons), made a bunch of applesauce, and our kids ate more apples straight off the tree than seems possible. What an amazing year.