Garlic: from planting to harvest!

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Growing Garlic 🧄 #Shorts

I grew a lot of garlic this year as it was one of my successes last year. I classed it’s as a success as I got enough bulbs to last us about 10 months. But that year’s growing of garlic was not without its problems!

First of all it was a very dry year (winter and spring) so I had to harvest early as the plants were yellowing, there was rust and they weren’t going to grow anymore. In addition, I noticed a lot of white rot on the bulbs when I harvested them.

On many it wasn’t so bad and I could peel them and remove the worst, and evidently a lot of them stored well nonetheless. However, I thought they were rather on the small side.

Later in the year I realised I had a lot of damage to my onions and, even later, my leeks from the allium leaf miner. One of the effects it can have is that the burrowing of the larvae leaves the bulb of an allium susceptible to opportunistic fungal disease, just like white rot. So I put on my scientist hat and made the connection: I had had earlier damage from the allium leaf miner on my garlic ☝️

So after some reading around, it seemed like the best thing for me was to grow all my alliums under mesh this year. And as soon as the garlic started growing I covered them over. The other important thing I did was to make sure I used a bed that hadn’t had alliums in it the year before as the pupae of the allium leaf miner can survive the winter in the soil, infecting your crop under the mesh.

And it worked a treat! I now have huge garlic bulbs coming out of my ears 😆 as they were allowed to grow uninterrupted under the mesh they grew much larger, also probably due to the wetter weather. Interestingly, I have had no garlic rust on my plants this year. Not sure if mesh would protect against that though so might just be a fluke 😂

Besides the great number of large garlic bulbs I also got:
- 4 split bulbs
- 8 small bulbs
- 2 mono bulbs
- 3 rotten ones

All in all, an excellent haul 👌 And I have three more varieties plus elephant garlic 😂 so no vampires here!

To prepare garlic for curing and storage:
- peel off layers until clean
- trim roots
- cure in dry ventilated place until all dry
- plait and hang up 👌