Seed Garlic

Last year I planted seed garlic LINK and LINK and lifted them this June, put them in a seed tray in a dark and airy spot.

Here are the results.

They have to be replanted every year for 3 or 4 years. Then you'll have big, healthy garlic cloves. 

Sunday saw me replanting the ones above (2010 seed).

Some of last years seed was a good size!

I also put in seed garlic I saved from this years garlic crop (2011 seed).

One of the 2010 seed heads prior to planting - very similar to the one I planted this year - I separated each little clove and sewed them,  about an inch or two apart, in a row. You can plant the whole head as it is - click on the link above to see the, really pretty good, results.

The aim is, in future, to bring on my own garlic from seed, which at nearly a tenner for enough good organic garlic cloves to give us a years supply, will represent a good investment - probably.

I like to run a line, scratch a shallow guide drill and dibber titchy holes in which to pop the cloves. The soil has been well dug and will be top dressed with manure. That means I'll chuck manure on top of the soil.

My bed of garlic is quite a large one as it has 2010, 2011 seed, plus ordinary garlic and Elephant garlic - last years replanted as it formed unsegmented balls - because it was delivered late.

Garlic Bulbletts Year 2

Last October I planted lots GARLIC BULBLETTS.

Most of them looked like this, inside they have masses of tiny GARLIC SEGMENTS.

CLICK HERE to see the post about planting these BULBLETTS..... and why bother to!

Today, I dug up the bulbletts,.

and this is the kind of thing I found.

Clearly, they're a lot bigger now. I'll replant them all, once again, this October/November - somewhere around the LONGEST NIGHT. If I plant up the bulbletts from this year and then next year ....... and so on, I'll be able to produce good quality garlic, year on year, right here in Nailsworth. 

In another 2 or 3 years I'll have my first crop of BIG GARLIC CLOVES 

PROBABLY 

Garlic - Monday 4.4.11

Brought a big bunch of GARLIC into the kitchen. 

I still have a couple more bunches left in the shed. I think they will last until this years harvest is in, towards the end of June.

Garlic Bulbletts Saturday 9.10.10

The garlics that have a central stalk often put out a cluster of BULBLETTS at the end.

They look like ONION DOMES  to begin with and later, as the individual little cloves develop, they explode: in extreme slow motion.

They are coloured, in the same way as the garlic that puts them up.

Break up each bulblett into a bag. There will be loads of them.

Sow them at 2 or 3 inches apart and leave them until next summer, at which point they should be dug out. This has to be repeated for 2 to 4 years, by which time you should have big  garlic cloves.

Why bother with all this? Well, because the bulbletts are carried high up on a stalk, they don't pick diseases by coming into contact with the soil. They, apparently, produce consistently bigger  cloves. When recycling garlic bulbs, rather than eat them, they produce smaller and smaller bulbs each year.

When Badgers Turn Bad! Saturday 25.9.10

I Got up this morning, opened the front door and was confronted with THIS!!

The Badgers have found a way in to our garden and had a really good rootle around.

It may sound all  very sweet, but 

BUT LOOK AT THE HOLES IN MY  LAWN. 

It's never been so well aerated.

The evening before I had sat outside, until it got dark, cleaning the garlic.

I wasn't scared, with all that garlic around me, the VAMPIRES didn't stand a chance!

I bundled each type and labelled them so that we can taste test them and do a comparison.

Next time we grow garlic, I'll use cloves from this years plants. The nicer they taste, the more of them we'll grow.  We've grown about 150 bulbs this year. We need about 80 to eat and about 20 to grow next time. The remaining 50 can be sold, or given to friends.

Garlic Harvest 4.7.10

The tradition is that we 

PUT GARLIC IN ON THE SHORTEST DAY

AND LIFT IT ON THE LONGEST.

Well, I'm a bit late, but then again, they're a bit bigger than they would have been if I'd taken them out earlier.

These are from my neighbours, the ones in the Garden Plot will stay in even longer as they went in VERY LATE.