Not too late to get garlic down
Now is the time to plant your garlic.
The shortest day is the traditional time to plant it but even a month or two later won’t really make much difference.
Garlic, like all the onion family, is acutely sensitive to day length and does most of its growing as the days are lengthening. Growth stops by mid-January when the bulbs should be ready for lifting once the tops have started yellowing.
Garlic or Allium sativum is native to the desert country of the Caspian Sea to the Ural mountains and is now grown, or at least used, nearly world-wide.
I must admit it was very rarely used by households in New Zealand when I was young, but as we have become gastronomically more adventurous it is now used here in many Mediterranean, Asian and Middle eastern dishes.
For those who find traditional garlic too strongly flavoured there is a milder, larger sized ‘‘elephant garlic’’ whose individual cloves are very suitable for roasting or barbecuing
Garlic needs a rich, light sandy or gravely soil and an abundance of sunlight to do really well, although it will put up a good show on lesser soils. It is said that the hotter the summer, the larger and more abundant individual garlic cloves will be.
Garlic hates to be waterlogged so a good draining soil is a necessity, and this needs to be enriched to provide a really good crop.
Nitrogen is the crop’s most important nutrient. This should be used during the period of leaf growth, stopping the applications after mid-December, as the plant will then use the nutrients stored in the leaves to assist bulb development.
Organic gardeners prepare the soil for garlic well in advance, adding very well-rotted compost liberally to the soil as well as poultry manure or sheep pellets, plus regular feeds in the growing season of liquid fertiliser.
It is difficult to know how many to plant for your own use. We plant about a hundred plants which gives us enough to give some away and for our own use until the next harvest, plus providing enough good cloves for planting the next season.
It is best to save your own cloves or get some off a friend for replanting as sometimes cloves bought for eating have been treated to stop them from sprouting.
We save the largest individual bulbs from last year’s crop and plant them spaced about 8cm apart in rows about 40cm apart, buried with the tops about 4cm below the surface of the soil.
Once the bulbs have started to grow and appear above the soil, not much attention is needed apart from keeping the bed well clear of weeds. Watering is necessary only in dry conditions and even then only when the plants are actively growing, which is usually before the longest day.
When the tips of the leaves start to yellow it is a sign that the bulbs are mature so the whole cycle takes about seven months.
To harvest the crop dig it up with a garden fork and shake or wash the soil off the bulbs and leave to dry thoroughly in the sun for a week or so. Once dry, take them indoors or in an open shed until the foliage withers, when they can be plaited to hang up for use throughout the following season, or the withered foliage cut off and the bulbs stored in netting bags like the Chinese imported garlic seen for sale in supermarkets.
When storing, it pays to allow plenty of air circulation to help prevent moulds.
We hang ours up plaited in bunches in the kitchen and cut off whole bulb clusters when required. The individual bulbs can be prepared for cooking by easily removing the outer dry skin by lightly smashing the bulb with the flat of a carving knife.
Bon appetit!