[svalli]

Does your ground freeze deeply?

Here the ground freezes so deep that it takes long time for it to thaw enough for planting and then it may be getting too warm rapidly. I know that some people here keep the cloves in the refrigerator until they can be planted to garden. My first tries on garlic few years ago was planting cloves directly to the garden during spring without any cold treatment and all I got was single rounds.

I have grown garlic only two successful seasons so far and first year I got the planting stock so late that I had not time to plant all of them. Luckily I saved half of them for spring and kept them in refrigerator and planted in pots in March and transplanted to garden in end of May. My fall planted did very poorly due to location in shady spot next to birch trees. The spring planted ones grew much better in the middle of the vegetable garden.

My fall planted garlic is in better spot now and should produce well like it did last year. One reason for this fiddling with spring planting is that I did not want to risk loosing the seed stock if the winter is bad for the fall planted garlic.

We had quite warm December followed with a week of temperatures below -20°C in beginning of January with almost no snow cover and I'm a bit concerned if the garlic and many other plants survived. It will be nerve-wraking to wait what comes up when the snow is melting.

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