The Garlic harvest December 2009
Such a lovely and satisfying way to celebrate the solstices. This is the second attempt at garlic growing for us, and this is by far more successful than the first. I so recommend growing your own!
The photo above was taken in August and shows the first strong shoots pushing up through the mulch and good worm cast compost… only four months later and we have these!
I found some lovely large organic garlic cloves at my local organics shop, much of which was already sprouting and was much better than the seed garlic I bought from the plant shop the previous year. We used the same bed in the garden, and for the six months it was between crops we added several layers of compost as garlic apparently uses a lot of nitrogen. After planting the cloves we covered the bed in a thick mulch of leaves.
It was really very easy to grow, we have a worm farm which provides a good liquid fertilizer, that I applied fairly regularly, we had plenty of rain and so I did not need to water very often until late November. We also tended to avoid many other plants growing in the same bed as garlic is one of those plants that does not make a good companion, ours shared the bed with some self-seeding Kale and Calendulas and that was about it.
It took a morning to brush off the dried dirt and braid up, about 50 cloves, six of which stayed smallish cloves and a couple that were spiked by the fork, so plenty for us and some to share around. It’s good to let it air dry, we kept it mostly shaded for a few days until it was ready for braiding. The flavour seems to develop nicely as the cloves dry, but you can still cook with them fresh.
Tags: food, grow your own, herbs, Plants, Seasonal Celebrations