What does the word vernalization mean and why do we care as gardeners? Well if you break down the Latin it means of the spring and basically what it means in

plain English is the beginning of the flowering process of a plant by exposing it to cold. Now a lot of us don't do it that way we

artificially expose it to cold. We don't have a winter or we want to start a plant out

of season, whatever the case may be.

And so a lot of plants that are native to temperate climates,

which are climates that are typically going to have

a pretty low and cold winter temperature,

they have acclimated to that.

They need that cold temperature in order to properly come up in the spring.

So the classic example of this as far as an edible crop would be garlic.

Garlic, especially hardnet garlic, or explicitly hardnet garlic, needs vernalization before or after planting. So for colder zoned people it would be

after planting because you just let it go through the fall and winter. For someone like myself, which is a zone 10b gardener, it's really kind of difficult to get there.

And so I need to expose it to artificial temperature. I mean, I need to get it basically into my fridge for

about six to 12 weeks before I can even get I just don't have a chance of growing

hard-neck garlic unless I do that and that is one of the mistakes that I made last year with my garlic

is I didn't do it long enough so I had it in the fridge for about four weeks I

should have done it much longer like I said six to twelve weeks it seems like you need 10 to 12 weeks the warmer your climate. So I actually

just got I would say about 80% hardneck garlic, 20% soft neck garlic.

Soft neck I can do fine here in Southern California.

But the hard neck, I got from a farm called

Squared Roots Farm up in Oregon. Really nice folks who sent me out some garlic to try, and it really

just is an experiment. I'm going to vernalize it, I'm going to put it in the fridge for

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