This year I am growing garlic. I have dedicated one of my vege beds to garlic until it’s harvest.
I am growing three types of garlic. Early White and Italian Red softneck varieties and Early Purple a hardneck variety. Above are the cloves broken apart from 2 bulbs of each.
These are the early purple cloves broken up and ready.
Here are the Italian red ready for planting.
And above are the early white.
I prepared the bed pretty basically. Weeded and dug around with a bad of mushroom compost spread over it and raked through. I then made 4 troughs for each of the types and counted out the cloves between the 4 rows.
Hogan totally helped. As he lives under my feet he is ever present in my gardening.
After they were counted out, I planted them approx 15 cm apart under about 5cm of soil.
I then watered the bed well daily and waited for the sprouts. They all came through at different times. The bed got a little weedy, but I wanted majority if not all sprouts to be up before adding mulch.
My favourite daily activity was coming out to the bed and looking for tiny tiny sprouts poking out of the soil. Can you see the one above?
Here is a close up of the first set of sprouts that grew. They popped up really quickly.
Here is the bed mulched. I didn’t write down the order I planted them in, so I am not really sure exactly which set is which. I think the hardneck is at the far end here, due to the type of leaves and stalks it is building. They came up the last and have had a 100% sprout rate.
Here are the hardneck in their green sprouting beauty. I am still undecided if I will be harvesting the scapes or leaving them. I have seen two different views. 1 is to cut them out to help the bulbs focus on being bulbs, 2 is the opposite that cutting them means they focus on growing more. So until that happens I will do a bit more research.
Here is my worst performer when it comes to sprouts. They are fairly limp and small and have only sprouted about 70%.
This set was the first to sprout (thus so far the most developed) but also an under performer when it comes to the amount sprouted.
I plan on filling the gaps where I didn’t get sprouters with another 2 bulbs to really get the most out of the space in the bed and the maximum harvest. As it is still autumn there is still time. But then of course a very long wail until November when I can harvest hopefully fat bulbs.