Wild Hope Homestead

Yesterday was the shortest day, woohoo! Winter still has a long way to go but I love the thought that I will start getting more daylight hours from now on. It’s hard to get motivated to do things when it gets cold and dark. And when you’re feeling like a hippopotamus that is about to explode… That’s how I felt for most of the weekend, so not much was accomplished. Fortunately, I have Mondays off work now. Today was a beautiful, sunny day and I was feeling a lot more functional so it was my second-chance-Saturday.

I decided it was a good day to plant my garlic. This was after a pruning incident in which I whacked myself in the eye socket with a branch. Oops. It hasn’t turned black yet so I think we’re all good. Since the vege garden beds are still in a state of dismantlement and chaos, the only decent place I could plant the garlic was in the long narrow tomato bed. I will be planting tomatoes in it later on but I figured I could squish a row of garlic along the front. I dug in the small, lonesome bag of horse pooh that I had managed to acquire. I have had trouble finding poop of late. The location near my work that usually has a large supply of bagged poop had nothing when I went there recently. You’d think that I could find some pretty easily driving through the country so much, but no. I have even developed the poop eagle eye. My eye picks up all forms of bags sitting outside people’s properties. But they all seem to be rubbish at the moment. I need to go on a real poop hunt.

After my digging I sat down for a nice rest while I sorted out my garlic cloves. Last year I bought my garlic bulbs to plant and then saved the biggest bulbs from the season’s harvest. I was pleased to find so many big cloves from my crop. They were definitely bigger than the ones I started with so I am making progress! I would like them to get bigger and bigger every year until they are GIANT. That would be fun. Some of the cloves had even started rooting. I sorted them into the nice big cloves, a few maybes and the not-gonna-make-it ones, which will be eaten instead. A side-benefit was saving the outer skin and old root offcasts to sprinkle into the chicken house to help repel mites and other nasties.

I ended up with 26 cloves poked into their little holes. I covered ’em up, watered ’em in and now, we wait…