Given that we have Garden Blogging (ala Saturday Morning), and groups for Living Simply and Urban Homesteading onsite now, I decided to share my experiences with growing and harvesting a low maintenance, small footprint, versatile and tasty food - Garlic. A lot of people are hesitant about their abilities to grow anything, but are feeling pinched in the pocketbook and dubious about buying foods imported from third world conditions. Below the fleur de kos, I'll expand upon my experiences with selecting a type of garlic, buying the starter cloves, preparing them, planting them, tending them, and harvesting them. I've also kicked in some links to other diarists' work onsite about garlic.
Garlic is one of the most widely used edible plants around. Our own Patric Juillet (aka Asinus Asinum Fricat in the old days) delves into the history of garlic and provides some tasty recipes in his tour de force garlic diary. He provides additional recipes in his What's for Dinner diary, and discusses the problems of imported Chinese garlic in The Garlic Wars.
Further recipes come to us courtesy of Something the Dog Said with Sunday Bread: Gluten Free Garlic Basil Bread and Sunday Bread: Garlic Bread. Julie Waters provides our last recipe link with her Garlic Scape Cilantro Pesto.
Garlic has a variety of purported health benefits, claims of which the government has handily collected for you by reviewing peer-reviewed journal articles at the Medline Plus Drug Info page on Garlic. This page also notes when not to eat garlic, for instance when you're being treated with Isoniazid for tuberculosis, or with various HIV drugs, as it will reduce the effectiveness of the drugs. The good news? Garlic seems to provide some benefits in terms of lowered blood pressure, reducing atherosclerosis, and the incidence of colon, rectal, and stomach cancers.
So you've got some recipes you're dying to try, but you're dubious about buying foreign garlic dumped on the US markets, and would like to try your hand at growing your own. Let's do it :)
Your journey starts with reputable seed companies, or friends who can supply starter heads from their own gardens. If you've tried heads from a friend and they taste good, by all means use them! If not, hit a good seed store to read up on the various variants available in the US. I use Seed Savers Exchange by preference, although I was too late last year, and wound up purchasing my starter bulbs from Territorial Seeds last year. Shuffle around the descriptions of the types of garlic until you find some that sound like what you might enjoy. I chose Inchelium Red last year, and considered Music. You want to place orders early in the year, or else face the possibility that your provider of choice will have run out, and you'll wind up as I did, shopping around the net for a new provider.
Garlic is generally planted in late fall, and your seed company provider will typically ship your garlic at the proper time of year for you to plant it. Here in SW Ohio, that means late October or early November, although that might shift later in the year if we keep warming up. Basically, you want to plant your cloves when the soil is already staying cool to cold, but before any snows or freezes.
You may have to prepare your cloves for planting. When my order from Territorial came in, I noticed a sunken in areas on the bulbs that, once I peeled away the outer papery sheathing to pull the individual cloves apart to plant showed that I had been sent diseased bulbs, from which I eventually extracted around 1/3 of the cloves as being good to plant. You do not want to infect the soil in which you will be planting your cloves. What I did to avoid this was to peel off the paper coating around each individual clove, then soak the cloves overnight in a diluted solution of alcohol-based mouthwash. (You can use the alcohol of your choice, but I didn't want to waste scotch...) In the morning, I took the now minty fresh cloves out and one by one rubbed them gently to remove the remaining paper-thin sheath around the clove itself, then rinsing the clove and sorting it. Cloves that were showing no signs of disease I kept to plant. Those that looked wasted or discoloured in part or whole I simply discarded. If you do not get rid of every single bit of the layered papery covering around the cloves, you leave the chance that whatever mold, fungus, or bacteria that was on the outside is still going into your soil along with the clove.
The soil you use should be loose and rich in organic matter. I planted in raised beds full of a compost/manure mix I picked up at my local garden center that I made sure was safe for vegetables (some soil mixes are intended for use with non-edible plants). If your soil is hard and compacted, your bulbs will have no room to grow. (With any root crop plant, you want nice loose soil.) Each clove should be planted about 4 inches from the next or from container walls, as your final bulbs will generally be about 2-3 inches across if they grow well. Plant each clove about an inch or inch and a half deep. If you have squirrels in the neighbourhood, get used to replanting your cloves every day for a week or three, as the little buggers will dig them up, nibble tentatively, then drop them again for you to replant.
I assume you can probably plant in planters as well, for terraces/patios/etc, but would like to hear from anyone who has, as such plants will have less insulation from the cold and a greater tendency to dry out, I would suspect. As I recall, I did see some spindly stalks come up before winter hit last year. This is the fun part. Garlic is tough. We had ice storms, hail, deep snow, bitter cold. And in the spring... up came the garlic leaves, as though nothing had happened.
Maintenance - there almost was none. We had a horribly wet spring, but had there been long dry patches, I would have watered lightly every couple of days. I harvested my garlic when the green stalks had gone yellow and dried out, which, thanks to our heat wave, was a week or so ago, although in a 'normal year' if we ever have those again, I suspect it would have been another month or more before I'd pulled up my bulbs. Each individual clove had produced an inch and a half to a two and a half inch bulb. I chopped off the stalks about an inch above the bulb, chopped off the roots just below the base of the cloves, washed the bulbs and set them out to dry, then moved them to a (relatively) cool, dry place. I chose out the largest bulbs to set aside to pull apart in October to plant next year's crop, and am using the rest as needed in food :)
All told, my time investment, since I already had the raised beds, was time spent choosing a variety, placing my initial order, cleaning and prepping the cloves, planting them, watering them maybe three times and harvesting them. I did spend $10-20 on my initial order, but now I've got starter cloves in perpetuity, as long as I hold some back each year.