Yay garlic!

October 10..
Recently, I built two new raised beds for garlic... Today they got completed. The first layers got rained in real good, and today I shoveled in the second layer of manure. Then we took the truck out to the back 40 and dug up some sandy topsoil to top off the boxes...

Then I planted in 240 cloves of garlic. 10 kinds of hardneck, 1 kind of softneck. What all did I plant in?
12 South Haven
18 Leningrad
30 Great Russian
12 Skips 1
30 Kankankee softneck
18 Up North
6 Skips 1
18 Skips 2
48 Kankankee hardneck
16 Lawrence
32 Porcelain Pearl

Two of the beds are 3x6, and one bed is 4x6. I pulled apart all the heads I harvested this summer, and picked out the best of the cloves for planting. And now I have a rather nice heap of garlic for eating too!

October 13
So I made another 9 half pints of pickled mushrooms, and another quart of fridge pickled mushrooms. They are quickly becoming a house favorite!
The weather has been nice enough to get a bit of outdoor activity done... But more importantly, it rained last night and for a while this afternoon, and the new solarium roof is perfectly dry! Whoo-hoo for a job well done! Now that I know it's nice like that, I can get the boards off the pond, get the solarium cleaned up and pots back into place- and get back to work on the beading bench.

Started in with the seed trade lists on the GW- one of them has been nice, but right now a request for SASE is kind of turning into a PITA! I get the request if I am willing to do a SASE- I say sure, just make sure it's a bubble envelope to protect the seed. I get a long email back about how the person won't do bubble mailers, all sorts of special instructions as to how they like seed sent- and that I need to take the SASE to the post office just to get it hand stamped! Do you realize that most post offices really don't like to do hand stamping, they only want to do machine stamping? And WTF is a SASE about if I have to do special running to another city to see if maybe they might be willing to hand stamp? I have done a lot of trades, and this is the first time I've gotten this kind of fucked up special requesting on what is basically me giving away seed for free- something I normally only allow to newbies. And this person claims to have done tons of worldwide trading, but is awfully particular and fucked up about it all. And their seed list is all "oops, my shit is all crossbred, take your chances with the seed". Sigh. Trading should not be that complicated.

And today I went in for Election Official training- it was interesting, but a little overwhelming on information! Lots of details got covered. Makes me glad I get to do a second round in orientation the Saturday before elections! I am looking forward to being a participant in the voting process, pretty cool stuff to do civic duty and all.