“What is a garden hod?” you are probably asking yourself.  Well, thanks to our friends Scott and Sara who bought us one for a Christmas present, I now know.  We now own a Pike’s Original Maine Garden Hod.  It’s a harvest basket to help out in the garden. This summer we can collect all of the vegetables from our garden, and rinse them off and the clumps of dirt that may still be attached will fall through the holes.  Apparently, these types of baskets were originally used to gather clams, and Scott and Sara love theirs. Hopefully this will put a stop to me using our re-usuable grocery bags for harvest and winding up with clods of mud inside them and eventually dirt in our kitchen!

Jake and our garden hod filled with toys.

The garden hod is currently being used as a tote for Jacob’s toys.  He thinks it is really funny to pick up a basket this big and heavy, and likes to try to carry it around the house.  Hopefully by the summer he will give it up to us because I think this will be very convenient and am really excited to try it out, thanks guys!  This summer when we start using it I’ll try to remember to do a post on how we like it.

Back in September we wrapped up our garden activities, took down our drip system for winter storage, and cleaned up our garden.  We also planted some garlic cloves to overwinter in the hopes that this summer we will have fresh garlic.  We found The Garlic Store, an online store based out of Fort Collins, Colorado that grows organic garlic for replanting along with fresh garlic for eating, garlic salsas, and other garlic gifts.   We tried their sampler pack this year to see what grows well in our garden and try a few different varieties.  The sampler included eight varieties, and I can’t remember all of them off the top of my head, but here is what I do remember: Polish White, Inchelium Red, Chesnock Red, Elephant Garlic (which is not really garlic at all but related to leeks), and Persian Star.

We have been cooking a lot this year due to all of our food issues, and garlic seems to be in almost every meal, so we are really excited about the possibility of growing our own.  We have read that garlic is highly adaptive to your own garden, so if you take the garlic you’ve grown and replant the biggest cloves each year, they will adapt to the micro-climate in your own garden and grow easier and better every year.

I am a little worried that the garlic hasn’t been getting enough water.  Our community garden turned off the water in October.  But we mulched it with straw after we planted it in September, and hopefully the snow and mulch will be enough to keep the garlic moist.  I need to go over to the garden and check on it to see if we have any sprouts yet, we’ll keep you updated with pictures when we do.

Has anybody either eaten or planted heirloom garlic?  Any tips for planting, or favorite varieties?