Garlic Planting - Winter 2016

These are the first two of three garlic beds I've planted this year, both used for the broad bean landrace last year. There's a wider third bed which was dug and planted out in several days of hot weather. Here are the varieties and the beds they're planted in:

• Bed 1: Ajo Rojo (Trade-Me, 2016)
• Bed 2: Rocambole Early White (Koanga, 2016)
• Bed 2: Rocambole Early Red (Koanga, 2016)
• Bed 2: New Zealand Purple (Koanga, 2016)
• Bed 3: Takahue Red (Koanga, 2014, replanted)

Here are the two ex-broad bean beds dug up and weeded. There were of course some volunteer broad beans growing, some of which were perennial planted before the last Winter.

Bed 2: Rocambole - Early White.

Bed 2: Rocambole - Early Red.

Bed 2: New Zealand Purple.

No photos were taken of the planting in beds 1 and 3.  I think some of the varieties were sprouting already, perhaps the Ajo Roja.  My memory is failing me.  I had wanted to get these in earlier, but was too busy to prepare the two existing beds, and dig out the third one.

Processing Takahue garlic

I gathered the garlic out of the shed, and cleaned it, then brought it inside for processing.  First step was sorting the heads for size.

I bagged up a small onion sack of the largest heads.  I did another bag for myself, and then the rest went to people who also do not like spending $20 a kg for garlic.

The bag below was awaiting delivery.

I also plaited some of the smaller heads, really struggling to follow some YouTube videos.  And then there's another small amount still hanging out in the shed, which came from a second bed interplanted amongst all the seed kale. Those are kind of stunted and probably suffered for what they were planted between (brassicas) and perhaps also lack of water.

Drying seed

Here's both my red ursa kale seed and garlic heads drying in the shed.

Unharvested garlic results

I'd heard someone say that if you didn't harvest a head of garlic, what would grow would be small due to the lack of space the clustered bulbs would have.  I noticed in late Summer/Autumn 2015 that I'd missed some (likely I'd been pulling them out of the sandy bed by  their stalks and the stalks broke off) as they's already started sprouting.

So, returning to that bed, when I was down to the last two "volunteers" I decided to photograph them.  There are two resprouted heads here.

And here are the heads dug up and laid out in approximately the same places.

The head on the left produced small and poxy heads.  And the head on the right produced decent sized heads.  My vague recollection was that out of the eight or so "volunteer" heads, only two were small and poxy, and the other six were decent sized. I wish I'd been more proactive in taking photos to be sure.

Harvesting the garlic

The Summer 2015 garlic harvest was rather lackluster, likely because of a lack of water. Winter 2015 I planted a lot more, and made sure to water it at least once a week if it hadn't rained that week.

The following photo is of the main bed with perhaps 2/3 to 3/4 of the garlic still to harvest.  The garlic along the far right hand side and end of the bed, seemed to sprout months after the near end.

A decent sized head.  It rained for several days before the photo, and this bed is still mucky, so most heads are hard to clean of dirt.

This bin contains all the garlic that remained in the bed above, and a few more that were lost in Summer 2015's harvest and regrew in that garden bed.

The garlic that sprouted and put leaves out earlier grew to a decent size.  I'll set aside the best heads and in Winter 2016 plant at least twice as much.  After all, garlic goes for $20+NZ a kilo here.

Growing out an unharvested garlic head

For some reason I tried, and I know I am not the only person to do so, as I've seen others mention doing so... was leaving a head of garlic in the ground where it had grown, and to see what happened after another year.  The response when someone else who mentioned doing this got, was that the cramped cloves would turn into much smaller heads - therefore it wasn't worth doing.

This is the garlic head sprouting way back in early July.

Unharvested garlic head sprouting 

And the same head harvested in early January, pretty much six months later.

Harvested heads from the unharvested head

These heads are tiny, and the effect of the cramped cloves is obvious.  I put a New Zealand one dollar coin in there for size perspective.  If the goal is to pick the largest cloves you grow, and to replant them to hopefully encourage larger cloves further down the line, it is common sense not to leave your garlic in the ground.  It's a waste of good seed material.

Garlic Plantings

Every day, my garlic is growing more and more. I have no idea how many cloves I have planted, but it must be on the order of fifty plus.

Here's the hugelkultur garlic out in the paddock, on what I call Paddock Hugelkultur Plot #1.

And two photos of the first planting in the bed out back of the house. One a month and a bit ago, and the next several days ago.

And two photos of the second planting in the bed out back of the house. One a month and a bit ago, and the next several days ago.

Even now, it has grown noticeably from what can be seen in the photos.

Elephant Garlic / 2013-2014

I was given some cloves of elephant garlic, which I planted out in a lazy spot.

Day X+0: At this point, all have come up.

Day X+63: There appears to have been some attrition at this point. I suspect some fell over.

Day X+93: Nearing the point of harvest. I needed them to yellow up a bit more, I think to the second leaf.

Day X+100: Here's the bulbs harvested. They were hung up in the shed.

There were some mini-bulbs. They weren't bulbils from the flower heads, as I cut those off and ate them. I think they were hanging off the big bulbs. In any case, they were planted out in the paddock, where I think they rotted away. I should have potted them up and grown them to be transplanted when more sturdy.

Day X+228: The year's harvest of Elephant garlic was still hanging in the shed. I've not eaten any, and decided to just plant it out. Someone else mentioned that they use it as a leek, rather than eating the bland standard leeks. So, that sounds like a plan. The heads are broken up, and weighed. At 380 grams.. I don't know. It'd mean more if I knew how much last year's planting weighed. There's definitely more cloves though, because a clove turns into a head, which contains more cloves than it started as.. obviously.

Where the cloves are located for future reference.

The cloves are now covered over with the potting mix.

The remaining five elephant garlic bulbs are planted in the bed by the back door, near the lemongrass. I've recently read that the red leafed lemongrass isn't good for much. The other type is the one which gives the thick stems for cooking. This one at best can be used for a tea with it's dud red leaves. If this is true, then I think that avoiding buying any more Little Fruity branded products is probably a wise idea.

Day X+236: And finally, here's one bulb of normal garlic I left in the ground last summer. Each of the cloves has sprouted. I'm just going to leave this here indefinitely, and see how wide it can grow and divide over the future years to come. This is supposed to result in smaller cloves as it divides and is crowded out. To the right of the unharvested garlic, I planted out some mustard I grew. This was sprouted from seeds bought at a bulk food store. They're the kind of seeds you use for pickling. It seems to be surviving the frosts pretty well.

This unharvested garlic, and the second planting of elephant garlic, are actually in the same continuous bed. In this last photo you could see the cheap fencing I put in to stop the chickens getting in and scratching up everything.

Planting Garlic

You're supposed to plant garlic on the shortest day, and harvest it on the longest day. I think I was a week or two late in doing this. Anyway, my hugelkultur raised bed is doing okay out in the paddock. There was a side of it which wasn't planted out, and it's been too wet for most of autumn and what winter has passed, to dig more. So the garlic was going in there. I moved aside the mulch.

The garlic is takahue red bought from Koanga. Last year's garlic was okay, but this is supposed to be a larger cloved variety.

I poked a stick in the bed to make a hole, then pushed in a clove. And repeated heaps of times. There were lots of worms in the bed, and they were often in the poked holes in the way of the garlic.

Now to just wait six months until I can see the results of this.

Elephant garlic

Have I eaten elephant garlic? Yes. Do I remember what it tastes like? No idea. I think that I remember it as being pretty tasteless, and I wouldn't bother to have planted any, except I was given a packet.

Packet front.

Packet back.

It's in the ground beside my normal garlic, and took maybe two minutes to plant.

Planted.

I can always give it away.

Garlic and blackcurrant mistakes

In a previous post, I mentioned digging up my garlic and moving it because it was supposed to be bad to grow alongside my broad beans. And in another previous post, I covered taking cuttings from gifted pruned blackcurrant branches.

On the bright side, when I took this photo, one blackcurrant cutting had started showing green growth. And since then, maybe one or two more have also started showing their own. But on the not so bright side, I had been planting the cuttings wrong. I should not have been trimming off all the buds.

Green appearing on a cutting.

One later cutting I made, the only one I did not trim the buds from, pretty much started showing green growth a week or two after being planted. And I've not been able to locate any source of information which says to take the buds off.

The garlic is not so bad. The following picture shows the well filled row of transplanted garlic on the right, and an occasional garlic shoot on the left alongside the bean plants. It turns out that transplanting the garlic did no harm at all, and that I also missed transplanting some.

Lost garlic growing.

I should note the sticks alongside the right hand row of garlic were just marking where the cloves were buried, and are not cuttings.

Winter planting

What can I plant in winter?  I have no idea.  But there are websites, like GardenGrow, which claim to tell me what I can plant.  That raises more questions, like is my property temperate or cool/mountain zoned? I have no idea. It does link to tiny pictures that delineate whereabouts in the country the different zones could fall into, not that I could ever work out where my property falls on them.  Still, no idea.  Oh well, apparently there are some "no brainer" crops.

Broad beans.  These are apparently something anyone (this means me) could grow.  I planted these Sunday, 9th of June.  No idea where this packet was bought, or how much it cost.  Planting involved in simply pushing one of the hard seeds down a few centimetres in two rows in one of my raised beds.

Garlic.  This packet of Printanor was bought at New Zealand's equivalent to Walmart, called The Warehouse.  The price is visible in the photo, at $5.99.  Initially I planted the cloves on June 14th from this packet as two rows right beside the broad beans.  The thick end was pushed down, leaving the pointy end of a clove upright.  There were conflicting descriptions of how deep to plant them, so I went for pushing them down around 1.5 centimetres.  I've been told that if you don't push them down far enough, and a frost happens, then the cloves could pop out of the soil.

After two weeks or so, I researched enough to be able to have confidence in the claim that garlic doesn't go with legumes (which broad beans are) and that unless I moved them, they'd likely be detrimental to the beans. So on June 18th I dug up every clove, and moved them to the far side of the raised bed.  Is it far enough?  I don't think anyone knows, and if they do, they don't bother to write it down.  On the bright side, the garlic had sprouted and it was great to know that something was growing.

I was also given a packet of garlic bulbs which were from a local spray-free business.  These were planted in a flower bed just outside my front door.  This is the photograph just below with the green bulbs coming up in the front.  You can see the bulbs I've pulled out from amongst the garlic, in order to prevent they from getting in the way of the garlic growing and getting whatever nutrients it needs.  You can actually see the garlic green bits (no idea what the correct term is!) here popping up to about 1-2 centimetres in height.  This is growing much better than the "The Warehouse" garlic.  That could also be due to the move which the "The Warehouse" garlic had to put up with, though.

I've been doing quite a bit of damage to this flower bed, and in the process have had to try and tell the bulbs which were coming up from the garlic which was coming up.  The garlic seems pretty well rooted in, which is a good sign.

The following photo is the raised bed with the "The Warehouse" garlic still not above the soil on the right, and the broad beans visible on the left having just come up a week ago.  There's an olive tree in the back corner, and to the left of it, is a walnut.  Now here's another documented gardening problem, which isn't documented well enough to be useful.  All parts of a walnut tree are supposed to exude something called juglones.  Juglones supposedly "harm other plants".  This walnut has been shedding it's leaves and nuts into this raised bed for years.  How should I factor this juglone problem into using the raised beds below it?  Maybe this type of walnut is a kind which doesn't exude juglones?

It's the first week of August now, and after a snow storm which missed this part of the district, followed by a week or so of heavy wind, the weather has been unseasonably mild.  Plants are flowering, and trees have begun to bud.  I'm told there are further frosts likely to come, and that will equally likely damage anything fooled into thinking it's spring already.

All this should just take care of itself.  The broad beans I'll have to stake, so that they can climb up, at some point.  The garlic I'll have to do some further research on, both to work out when they will be ready, and what I would do if I wanted to leave them to go to seed.  I think it takes around six months for garlic to come up, if I recall correctly.  The olive tree.. I really need to do some research to work out whether if I move it out into the paddock, whether that will kill it.