Garlic! That most divine and smelly of alliums! No need to worry about how long garlic will store through the winter in our house - so far, I've not grown enough to make it from the early June harvest to the new year! But perhaps this year will be different. 102 cloves went into the ground last Autumn. Maybe this year we will have enough garlic to make it well past Christmas and into the New Year... or maybe, with more garlic, we will just eat more garlic before Christmas and the New Year!
Yes, you can grow the stuff from the grocery store, but, in my humble opinion, the hard neck stuff is much better. My favorite for two years running is "Siberian" - puts up with single digit winters, triple digit summers and relatively flaky watering patterns. Last year was my first year growing garlic and I only kept one bulb of my Siberian for planting out, choosing, instead, to eat most of it. This year, with more in the ground and a goodly fence to keep out marauding dogs (mine), I am hoping that I will feel like I have enough for consumption that I will actually save more for seed stock. If I can plant more and more and save more and more, then I won't have to spend more and more for garlic. In fact, it will start costing less and less to grow it. Then, the really good stuff, I will carefully pack and bring with us when we move. By then, I should hopefully have a second favorite (hopefully with different colored skins or cloves so I can easily tell them apart). I want to have "generations" of my garlic so that I can pass on seed bulbs to my children to grow - a stinky, yet tasty legacy!
Garlic should be planted about 6 inches or so apart, and in zone 6, about 2 inches deep. A good mulch will help keep the garlic from heaving during thaw-freeze cycles. It will also supress weeds and help moderate water loss and keep the soil cool when the heat strikes. With hardneck garlic, all the cloves are large, so none go in the cooking pot. Another thing to do with little cloves is to plant them barely an inch apart and grow them like green onions. Yummy in stir fry. One hardneck bulb breaks down into 5 or 6 cloves. Not a bad return on investment.
And, of course, some obligatory garlic resources:
- Garlic Seed Foundation - "an informal organization of growers and eaters allium sativum dedicated to its consumption and production."
- From About.com - a good little overview of garlic and garlic growing.
1 comment:
I was fascinated the first time I saw my garlic go to seed. I thought it would seed the same way as the onions and chives do. When I saw that the 'seeds' came up as tiny little garlics at the end of the flowering heads I was flabbergasted. Next time this happens I'll take a photo of it
Diana
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