Spring is WAAAY behind here in Chicagoland. My garlic, planted last October, is up to my waist now. Despite that, only 5 leaves out. I read that you shouldn't harvest until ten leaves are showing and the first four closest to the ground are dying away. Does that sound right to the experts on this site? The stalks are robust and thick, some of them pushing 3/4" in diameter.. No scapes are present, although they're hard neck garlic varieties.
Anyway, My onions are doing well and critters don't like to eat them or the garlic. I don't even see holes where they've been digging. In that area, at least.
By necessity, my garden is long and narrow, one of two terraces in my back yard, that also serve as a levee for the river beyond. It faces SW, so gets sun as much as the many tall trees nearby allow. I attached a picture - sorry about the ham radio antenna ladder line in the foreground. It's another of my hobbies.
I put up rabbit fencing and the next day I found two rabbits in the garden. They had climbed a short wall to get to the garden, so back to the hardware store to rabbit-proof the uphill side. I thought the wall and thick hosta and ditch lily plants would keep the rabbits out, stupid me.
I have trellis netting for my pole beans, sort of pup-tent style, and one day, one of the five or six families of geese had a gosling fall down the terrace and get tangled up in the trellis netting that you can see. I had to go in there and cut it free, and hand it off to Mom and Dad, who were nonplussed. The gosling in its struggles also took out a few bean seedlings. I replanted those, it's early enough in the season. My tomato seedlings did quite well this year, and will be great producers. I've also got a loofah plant, sweet peas, cucumbers, and a few oddball herbs like feverfew and tarragon, just for fun. Oh yeah, my dill plants are doing well, although still only 2" tall
That's the Des Plaines River in the background. No trout, but I can catch bluegill, LMB, SMB, and northerns in it.
When you click the picture, you'll see parts that are cropped in the thumbnail.
the alley part of the garden
