Winter Hill Garlic Planting

Tis the season for putting gardens to bed and planting garlic! School gardens around Somerville are planning fall garden clean-up days. Some schools are also planting garlic this month.

A second grade class at the Winter Hill Community Innovation School helped to plant 20 cloves of garlic. That means, when we harvest the garlic, we will have 20 bulbs of garlic!

We prepped the beds by removing all of the plants and large pieces of debris. Then we raked the soil to loosen it up. We wanted to make it easy for the students to plant the garlic, so we dug 3 trenches for them to plant their cloves.

Trenches for garlic

Cloves planted 6" apart

Carefully placing their garlic in the soil

Watching other plant their garlic

After planting the garlic, we took a peek at what was still growing in the rest of the garden. Eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, zinnias and chard are still hanging on! We even found a lethargic bee resting on a pepper plant.

Bee visiting a pepper plant

The students were very interested in the bee and had many ideas for why it wasn't moving. The garden is the perfect place to observe nature and develop hypotheses. We hope these exciting conversations will continue into the classroom!

Observing the bee

Content provided by Karyn Novakowski, Somerville Farm to School Project Director

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