For the past few years I’ve bought my seed garlic from The Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight. It’s always good quality, well dried, and ordering it gives me a chance to grab a couple of bulbs of their fantastic smoked garlic (which is properly smoked; long enough for the cloves to change to a rich golden colour and a softer texture, rather than just colouring up the outer skin as is the case for most other “smoked” garlic I’ve found).
This year’s order arrived on Friday and so on Saturday, with the ground still warm from a week of early Autumn sunshine, I took the opportunity to get it in the ground. Planting in Autumn gives the young shoots time to develop before winter’s cold kicks in and holds back any further growth, and a sharp frost or two will help the cloves to divide and grow on into full bulbs.
Preparation involved re-raking a patch of ground that had previously grown this year’s ‘Saxon’ potatoes and been covered over since they were lifted. There wasn’t too much weed to deal with and no need to rake too far down; garlic is an Allium so its roots are shallow and well-spread, rather than deep. As long as the tilth is nicely crumbed, they should be just fine.
Here’s the garlic, ready for planting out:
I ordered three varieties this year: Extra Early Wight (Allium sativum) which grew very successfully this year, Red Duke Wight (Allium sativum) which is a new (to me) variety that I’m trialling, and firm favourite elephant garlic (Allium ampeloprasum), which is supplied by the giant clove, rather than as a whole bulb.
Splitting the smaller bulbs into individual cloves yielded a total of 28 Red Duke and 36 Extra Early; if they all develop that will be a handsome harvest to keep us going through winter 2017/18.
And this is the planting arrangement, before they went in.
Row (A) is the Garlic Farm’s elephant garlic, the two rows (B) are Red Duke, then (C) is Extra Early and finally (D) is a row of cloves from our own elephant garlic harvest this year. I’ll be interested to see whether our own stock will perform any differently, given that they’re from plants that have grown and adapted to our local conditions and soil, rather than the very different temperatures and chemistry of the Isle of Wight.
The planting method was relatively simple: dib (or dig with a trowel for the elephant garlic) a hole around one and a half times the size of the clove, then sprinkle in a small amount of The Garlic Farm’s proprietary blend of garlic fertiliser (N-P-K 5-12-20 +3%MgO made with 100% of the K from Sulphate of Potash) before popping in the clove and covering over.
Once the shoots begin to show I’ll mulch over with leaf mould and then net the patch, just to keep inquisitive pigeons at bay. Garlic isn’t a crop that suffers much from slug-damage and although white rot and rust can be problems to watch out for in Spring and early Summer, it’s usually just a case of watering in prolonged dry spells, but otherwise letting it get on with growing. Wonderful stuff, garlic.