Growing garlic
March 31st, 2008 by trinatune
Early last year my friend Matt began his journey into the mythical world of growing garlic. Towards the end of last year I was able to sample some of his delicious and potent little cloves of garlicky goodness.
According to Matt, late February to early April is the best time for planting garlic in Sydney.
Taking Matt’s advice, I’ve held onto my bulbs from him until now - although I did eat about half … yum. I finally planted them today. My son helped by stuffing a clove into each hole I made in the soil. He then used his little watering can to moisten the soil.
Being 29 weeks pregnant, my belly and bad back are beginning to hamper my gardening abilities. Therefore, I’m winding up most of my garden beds for winter by heavily mulching them over and letting them rest.
However, I figure garlic will be pretty easy to grow over these months and won’t need much care or labour. The garlic now lives in the sunniest sections (during winter) of my garden.
Matt has kindly provided another update on his garlic expeditions - no doubt he has just planted some more garlic in his own garden. Read on for Matt’s update.
Garlic Update
By Matt Tucker
Shortly before winter last year I decided to try growing some garlic.
The theory with garlic is to plant it about a month or so before the cold weather starts (late Feb to early April for Sydney). This gives the plant time to grow a strong set of roots.
Over winter nothing much happens, until spring when the bulbs start to fill out. The bulbs grow until the plant flowers or the foliage starts to die off, which is when you harvest it. This worked quite well for me, as you can see from the picture.
In addition, I tried planting some more in spring - everything else grows in spring so why not garlic. It did work, but the bulbs were really small about half the size of the autumn planted ones.
Most of the garlic you buy in Australia is imported from China (and sprayed with growth retarding chemicals to increase the shelf life), so growing your own will reduce the greenhouse emissions that would otherwise have occurred transporting it here.
The transportation of food is a large source of CO2 emissions and ordinary agriculture is also quite energy intensive in itself. Organic produce, grown locally and in season is the best choice because transportation is minimised, inorganic fertilisers are not used (which are energy intensive to make), and there is minimal cold storage.
My verdict: garlic is one of the best value edible plants you can grow. It does take a relatively long time, but it is very versatile in cooking, and its shelf life is long.
I didn’t know that most garlic we buy comes from China - because of that I’ve just added garlic to the list of vegies we’re going to plant this winter!
I’m in Perth and I’ve just planted garlic, for the first time. A couple of books told me February to April, but I didn’t know about planting a month or so before the cold weather starts. Our cold weather starts about May, so I’m hoping I wasn’t too late. I got an organically grown bulb from WA, to make sure it hadn’t been sprayed with anything.
I’ve read you should hang it up to dry after harvest. Do you know how long this should be. I’m guessing it could last until the next years harvest, but I’m sure I’ll want to eat some as soon as I harvest it and I wonder how long I should wait.
I’ve seen garlic from Mexico in shops, but I get it grown in WA. Grown in my garden will be even better!
I was a bit late planting last year (and this year as well) and I still got a reasonable result, so i think you will probably have no trouble in Perth with your warmer weather.
We put our harvest on the windowsill for a while, and some in the fridge. After a few months when we thought we had eaten it all we discovered a bulb that was a bit slimy and mouldy in the bottom of the fidge crisper. It must be quite hardy because new shoots started sprouting from it almost as soon as it was rescued!
I think Trina put some of my original crop out to dry at her place. I’d be interested to hear if the cloves she planted from it have sprouted.
We planted out a lot of purple garlic in Southern Tasmania last year on the shortest day. It didn’t grow as big as previous crop.(also had a dry season) This year we are planting now and in about 2 weeks
approx 7,000 cloves will update at harvest.
Garlic will be one of the first crops to go in the garden for the house my GF & and I bought. All the imported garlic we get from SE Asia has some seriously nasty chemicals (methyl bromide for one).
http://www.diggers.com.au/Beware%20imported%20garlic.htm
o0 7000 cloves omg.
My sister inspired me to grow garlic. She tells me that when cooking a certain potato dish, she puts them in whole. If eaten by accident they taste good, but if you do that with garlic fromthe supermarket, you’ll spit it out (speaking from experience!)
Handy tip: apparently Australian grown garlic has roots on the bottom, but imported garlic from China is smooth without roots. This is how you can tell if you can use it to grow here - if it has roots then you can plant it.