This post is pretty much for my customers at the wake forest
Farmers Market.  As you all know I lost my Dad last August due to stomach cancer. He fought this battle for some seven years or so. Shortly thereafter mom came down with Dementia….  I really thought long and hard about putting mom in a nursing home but finally decided to tough it out  at home. She is really not that far gone yet.  We were lucky to find good people that would look after her during the day while I tend the farm. My beloved cohorts at the farmers market really supported me by helping me to sell produce at the market and cultivate the fields.  Those days that  I sit with mom, I take time to develop these pages and to delve into alternate energy research. As a result of the  compressed time constraints, this really has forced me to become  far more creative than I ever imagined and am able to actually produce more than when these unusual conditions were present.

      As you all know, I sent garlic and sweet potatoes to the Thanksgiving market,  and I hope to send a few items to the Christmas market as well. I just wanted all to know that I am alive and well but just presenting things somewhat slower.

Well guys, the seed garlic is cured and ready to be planted. This year I have a ton of edible German Extra hardy bulbs and  seed garlic for sale.  Over  the past five years,  I have been agressively experimenting with various ways to grow  garlic here in sunny North Carolina.  Starting out with just a few rows under plastic  and expanding out to a few acres direct seeded has been the theme.  It was not easy at first, planting garlic on plastic was a challenge. At first it was great. Then came the voles, then came the fire ants just waiting to make hotels out of my carefully laid plastic mulch. In the first two years the vole  population exploded exponentially. Not to say that to take up the plastic mulch was not a job in itself. When  the fire ants came in , their mounds entombed the plastic mulch with sand, notwithstanding the stinging bites on the hands and legs, removing the plastic became more of a job.  Finally Iet the plastic go, going to direct planting in double rows, using rotary hoes to gently hill the earth to the garlic plants.  This slight disturbance caused the fire ants to move on,  and caved in the tunnels that the moles and voles operate in vastly reducing their populations and tilling in the organic fertilizer that was applied .. how wonderful. Hence garlic is ready!  I have few hundred pounds currently available for ingestion, restaurants and my customers at the farmers market.

Rocky Ridge garlic