This is our second year of going through our garlic harvest and separating it into different size classes. This is useful to know how our garlic is doing and allows us to better answer questions around the effects of soils, the amount of irrigation, and population dynamics.
We made the above board to size out our garlic. This idea comes from the book: “Growing Great Garlic” by Ron Engeland. We gave ourselves more defined size classes than in the book given our desert environment and our hardneck garlic status. Using this method, we identify the largest heads of garlic that we will then be keeping for planting.
Because of our affiliation with Chrysalis Alternative School and the Math/Science/Sustainability program, we use this activity to teach the concepts of categorization, graphing, and percentages. We find this kind of hands-on activity not only inspires interest in agriculture, but also helps make learning math and science more relevant to the students…
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