looks like a good day for planting garlic

We had a torrential rain storm last night. My fall greens must have loved it. Now it's drying up and the sun is out. I brought a dozen bags of compost, manure and topsoil down to my garden yesterday. Also, a bale of salt marsh hay. I'm just waiting now for a new version of Photoshop to download (my old one didn't seem to work with my new Windows 10 OS). Separating the cloves as I wait. Once it's done, me and the dogs are going to go do some digging and plant garlic.

The new garlic patch is where my tomatoes were. I have three varieties from Territorial Seeds.
   8 oz Italian Late has 72 cloves!
   8 oz Music, 22 giant cloves
   8 oz Duganski, 45 pretty purple cloves

OK, I'm off to plant....

ordering garlic - where do you buy garlic?

I FINALLY remembered to order my garlic. I hope it gets here soon. I'd like to plant it at the end of this month - in 2 or 3 weeks.

My garlic crop had problems this year. More than half of it rotted in the ground. I only harvested 40 heads so I decided to eat them all and buy new (clean) stock. I usually like to save 75-100 cloves (about 15-20 of the biggest heads) for planting.

I checked a couple local sources first (Johnny's and Fedco) but seems they don't sell garlic.I had thought I might buy it at a local Farmer's Market, but didn't get to ANY this summer. (I've been swamped with my own vegetables...)

I ordered my seed garlic today from my old favorite: Territorial Seed Co. Three varieties: Duganski, Music, and Late Italian. (The first two are old favorites. I'm trying out Late Italian, a soft nect that sounds good.)

Where do you buy your seed garlic? I'd love to set up a list of sources.

what caused my garlic to rot? rotation, rotation, rotation

I've been thinking about why half of my garlic crop rotted this year.

In early spring, my garlic plants yellowed and curled and then died. This started mostly in one area of the bed and then gradually other plants curled and died more slowly. Some just stopped growing looking like a small plant, but when pulled, the bulb was rotten.

Once I saw the plants rotting, I worried that I planted where onions had been last year and maybe garlic the prior. This is my list for crops the bed the garlic was in.

2009: tomatoes, peppers
2010: beans, dill
2011: squash
2012: garlic
2013: roots, including onions
2014: squash
2015: garlic

So next I looked into garlic rot information online. I looked at a Cornell Plant Clinic factsheet on garlic diseases. There are several different types of garlic rot. I'm not sure which I had, but the ways to address them all are the same, so I'm not going to worry about an ID.

The Cornell sheet says:

... as with any crop, it is important to plant clean healthy seed. For most of the mentioned diseases (Basal Rot, White Rot, Downy Mildew and Nematode infestation), once the pathogen is established in a field, rotation away from Allium spp. for several years is an essential management tool.

It looks to me like I didn't rotate well because onions are also an Allium species. I think they snuck in there are ruined my 3 year rotation. Darn.

Well, next year I'll have clean fresh garlic seed and I'll see what I can do to avoid this bed for a long time.