Garlic Divas and Gurus

Comment by Angie Thomas on February 23, 2011 at 5:06pm

Not quite a diva, but I would love to learn more about growing garlic!  This will be only my 2nd year growing garlic but I am excited to see those first leaves poking up!

Comment by Country Girl on February 23, 2011 at 5:44pm

Welcome, Angie! *handing you a bonus garlic bread loaf for being the first group member* ....Thanks for chiming in...hopefully we will get a nice thing going here. We are in our 8th year growing, but babes in the woods yet to be sure. Happy to share our trials and errors, and the learning that has taken place over the years.  Which variety of garlic do you grow?

Comment by Angie Thomas on February 23, 2011 at 5:58pm

This year I ordered some Music seed garlic from Prairie Coteau Farm in my home state of South Dakota.  The cloves were enormous so I am really hoping for a good yield!  I only planted a 4 x 6 bed--we're obviously on different ends of the garlic grower spectrum!  :) 

Comment by Country Girl on February 23, 2011 at 6:19pm

Music is one of our favorites and best producers. German red is the other-both so tasty and long shelf lives and easy to peel and chop. Sure enough, big cloves yield big garlic bulbs!! We learned the verrrrrry hard way on that in year 3!! We planted every single weenie teeny clove, thinking our soil was so good it would have to produce a good sized bulb! Wrong! There was a lot of sweating, swearing and laughing that year ;o)

 We started year one with 150 bulbs and got so hooked on the fresh flavor, the ease of maintenance and all the free garlic we could eat--we had to keep going with it. Out of all the produce we've grown, it's definitely our true love and what we have decided to focus on.

Your big cloves should serve you well. I'm guessing your 4 x 6 bed will harvest out around 200 garlic bulbs? With about 5 cloves per bulb, at the high end you could replant about 1000 next season...but of course you will have to eat a bunch!, so those numbers vary....We always take out what we will eat in a year, share with family and friends, and then plant the remainder. It's a beautiful thing how it multiplies faster/bigger than bunnies. ;o)

Comment by Angie Thomas on February 23, 2011 at 10:27pm

I started growing garlic for the salsa that I have canned for the last 5 years--now I am also going to use it for tomato sauce, pesto, and venison stew.  I ran out of my garlic pretty early in the harvest season last year, but I hope it makes it into all my canning this year in addition to saving some to plant for next year.  Here's a couple pictures of my first ever garlic harvest from last year:

Comment by Country Girl on February 24, 2011 at 10:01am

Nice pix!!

Salsa! Yum! Canning is on my bucket list...someday when I have room, storage space and a fully functioning kitchen to do it in. Year one we were hard pressed not to eat it allave some for planting. We bought extra seed stock for the second year and jumped up to about 3000. It always seemed so...indulgent to be able to use as much garlic as you want to cook with--quite different from when you are buying the expensive garlic from the store and using it so sparingly to have it last and save money.  Now it's a garlic free for all!!

My latest endeavor with garlic was a roasted garlic/yukon potato/bacon soup....heavenly!...

Comment by Country Girl on March 3, 2011 at 11:19am

Warmer weather on the way has the garlic tips reaching for the sun! Our experience has shown that piling (clean) hay on top of the garlic patch helps reduce the amount of weeding we have to do to minimal. It's not too late to put hay on if you haven't already. Lots of weeds means smaller garlic, so keep your garlic babies happy with a weed free environment and you'll see their bodacious size come harvest time was worth the efforts!

Comment by Christene on March 6, 2011 at 12:49pm

Looking for any and all tips; thinking about growing garlic this year but I don't know the first thing.  Can anyone give me a place to start?

Comment by Country Girl on March 7, 2011 at 9:38am

Welcome folks! Happy Monday to you!

 

A warm garlic bread shout out to Christene--welcome to the garlic patch!!

 

Group member, Mary, had a question about the straw-wheather or not to leave it on, once the garlic sprouts come up in the spring...We leave ours on, as it provides a great weed barrier all season until harvest, as well as provides a "mulch" effect for retention of moisture in the warm weather months. In 8 years we have never had to water! Last year was our first year for top dressing with organic seaweed/water mixture, to give the garlics a little midseason snack.  The straw works wonders-feel free to put it all over- through the rows and everything, making a great weed free garlic patch. Just say NO to weeding!! ;o)

 

Christene-the best place I have found to start is with reading. The best book we've found is "Growing Great Garlic", by Ron Engeland--available at Amazon, etc. Great info there.

 

I'll be blogging later this week about some basic garlic steps, a basic FYI kind of info thing, so stay tuned midweekish...Monday is catch up day with everything that gets ignored over the weekend when everyone's home!

 

So, stay tuned for more spicy thrills coming from the garlic patch...until then, have the greatest day possible!!

 

Cheers!

CGG

Comment by Country Girl on March 28, 2011 at 5:30pm

Howdy peeps! Welcome to newest garlic diva, Cari! Been negligent of dong any weeding in here lately, been off running about the gulfcoast of florida, eating garlic pizza and garlicky tadziki sauce on gyros! But as with all good things that must come to an end, vacation is over and time to get back in the saddle. The early burst of warm weather here has garlic tips shooting through the straw mulch, but temps back in the 20's-40's lately will slow it down a mite. We've had plenty of precip here, with no worries of not enough water for the garlic babies during their early springtime growing period. ...Just cutting up the last of the hardnecks from last harvest for dinner tonite in a batch of spaghetti sauce...they have kept amazingly well this year. Have yet to get into the softnecks at all! Should have enough to see me through to the fresh stuff in June/July.  Hope everything is going well for all around their own garlic patches...happy spring everyone!

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