The Garden at 485 Elm
People growing together:
a collaborative community garden in Montpelier, Vermont

Garlic Harvest

We garden together every Tuesday evening, weather permitting. Here’s what we did yesterday. Garlic is ready to harvest when lots of other crops are ready, too.

Hannah and Ned harvest the garlic from where we planted it last fall.

Sorting garlic. Half the harvest will be distributed among the gardeners here for eating. Half will be seed garlic, which we’ll plant before frost for an even bigger crop next year.

Counting garlic heads to determine gardener share size. We grew two varieties:  large porcelain stiff neck garlic and a red skinned garlic (I don’t know its name).

 

We harvested other veggies, too. Here are before-and-after carrots.

Pole beans are coming along. Between the long, cold, wet early summer and the bugs, it took four plantings to produce a crop of pole beans and bush beans.

Winter squash is growing. We planted several varieties and aren’t sure which one this is. Red Kuri, perhaps?

Ella replants salad greens, which at this point in the season will be frost-hardy, such as spinach and mesclun mixes. Bernice picks food for donation, which we delivered to the Episcopal Church’s free community lunch kitchen the next morning.

Work parties now include harvesting. Picking beans, squashes, and cucumbers are now garden tasks to keep the plants under control. Oh, and to eat.

We grow more than food in the garden. Gardens that feed the senses include visual beauty, even when it’s non-edible.