I’ve been posting several entries now and realized I haven’t really told you who I am, so a formal intro is only proper. I’m Mark Baerwolf. I’ve been a line cook at the Roadhouse since the day it opened its doors 4 1/2 years ago. Gardening is something I’ve always done and I’ve gradually drifted toward heirloom veggies and an organic approach toward raising them. Chef Alex’s garden efforts are something that’s always interested me and I told him after his first gardening season how much I respected what he was doing. I’ve helped him out when I could and basically made my time in the Cornman Farm garden into a part time job last summer. With the help of some great volunteers from the Roadhouse and other Zingerman’s businesses Cornman had a rewarding growing season - lots of tasty tomatoes, peppers, carrots, potatoes and other veggies. We want to greatly expand our growing efforts this year and the exciting thing is Cornman Farm will be my full time job for the spring, summer and fall. Anna, who is a barista in the Roadshow will also be a full time Cornman employee along with some part time help from Jess who works at the Deli and some more great volunteers from around Zingermans. So we’ll be put out to pasture for the season, I guess.

So back to garden details. Its amazing what a little warm weather can do. Crocuses and other spring flowers are popping up and last years chives must have shot up six inches by this Sunday evening. The 500 row feet of garlic planted last October and covered with a good 12 inches of straw is just starting to emerge from the soil underneath this mulch. Over the winter I was worried about how to care for these beds this spring. I read a book written by an organic garlic grower in California, Growing Great Garlic, which was quite informative. The garlic bulb’s first shoot that emerges is apparently specially designed to force it’s way through a mulch layer - its tough and persistent, traits a gardener loves in any plant that’s not a weed. The garlic’s in a bed where we grew squash last summer. These rows were heavily amended with compost and organic fertilizer in preparation for the squash because these big vining plants need lots of nutrients. A benefit for this year as we thought about our plant successions is that a squash bed usually has less weeds the following year. All those huge leaves really shade any weeds underneath them and smother the weeds. So we tilled in the crop residue from the squash in the early fall and applied another good inch of finished compost to the beds prior to planting the garlic. We’ll start foliar spraying them in early May with some good compost tea and continue this every 2-3 weeks until mid-June, up to the summer solstice actually. Then we’ll drastically cut back the irrigation as the bulbs go through the final stage of maturity and sometime in July we’ll see what we have. I’m still a cook at heart so I’m dreaming of some kind of creamy green garlic soup with crusty bread drizzled with a grilled garlic scape infused olive oil. Yum!