Planting garlic

We’ve been busy with one of our last planting jobs of the year - sowing garlic.

Ideally, we would have planted the garlic in late October but weather was against us for the past two weekends or we were off collecting Graham the boar or I was busy during the week with other jobs.

And with a reasonably fine, if windy, day today, we seized the opportunity to get the garlic in.

The first task is to select a bed in the rotation that hasn’t been used for garlic before, that has been well enriched with compost but not recently, and that can be limed both for the garlic and the following crop.

In our case, that means the garlic follows one of the pumpkin beds - these were cleared of their plants a couple of weeks ago. I then worked them over with hoe and rake, clearing them of the bulk of the weeks and then working lime in to decrease the acidity.

A final weeding today and we were ready to start.

We initially tried growing organic garlic bought from the Organic Catalogue - both Thermidrome for autumn sowing and Printanor for later winter/early spring sowing. However, these were not a success and went mouldy or rotted despite being “bred for UK conditions”.

This year, we grew garlic sourced from The Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight. This was more successful, in that the bulk of the bulbs grew and did not rot, but the size was a bit disappointing.

So, we decided to try garlic from the Garlic Farm again for next year’s crop and see if we can get a better result.

Today’s plantings were Lautrec Wight, Iberian Wight, Solent Wight, Early Purple Wight and Elephant Wight. We ran out of time to sow all the Solent, plus some gourmet shallots - Eschalote Grise but I hope to get those in tomorrow.

With the bed ready, I first planted three bulbs elephant garlic. These are huge bulbs and are planted at least 12 inches apart with 18 inches between them and the first rows of the other garlic bulbs.

Using a couple of fingers, I made a hole deep enough to take the bulb, root end downward, and the an inch of loose soil. Then it’s just a matter of dropping the bulb in and covering it.

The smaller garlic bulbs were planted in rows 18 inches apart, with the bulbs spaced at six inch intervals. We mainly use raised beds for growing our vegetables so I use a scaffolding board place across the side boars - this makes planting and weeding easier while avoiding compaction of the soil.

Again, I use my fingers to make a hole deep enough to take a bulb with an inch of soil over it.

Then I work my way along the rows, dropping in the garlic bulbs and then returning to the beginning of the row to cover them with loose soil.

The ends of each row are marked with plastic tags. We’ve found that thick plastic tags last well and can be re-used multiple times (some of ours are three years old). Thin plastic tags become brittle and break after one season, pencil marks wear off aluminium tags and wooden tags rarely last more than a season.

Of course, it “speeds” things up if you have enough helpers. I’m still not convinced that mine actually help make the job faster but they certainly make it more interesting. Sorry, fun!!