Planting our garlic

Today, on the last day of April, we visited our patch and finally planted in our garlic! We thought it was best to do this earlier in April but didn't have time until now. However, the 'garlic guru' in our community garden (Tony) said that he always plants them in May and gets great results. So maybe we weren't too late after all. Everyone has different advice to offer and sometimes the information is so different that I have to decide who to listen to and just ignore the rest. That's one thing I've learnt from being part of this gardening community!

garlic goes into holes that are 5cm deep

my very straight row of garlic

five rows of garlic, 4m long

Before planting our garlic in, I had to prepare the soil. Yesterday, I had loosened the soil a bit and added sheep manure and gypsum to loosen the soil. It was previously used for our tomatoes but we had planted them so sparsly that the soil was still very rich in organic material (that's how it feels to me, I've never done soil testing etc.) Today, I found some hay from other areas and spread it evenly, and used metal bars to help me align the rows in a more-or-less straight rows.

It's important to make sure that the garlic points upwards. I did my usual research before going out (COGS has some basic info on growing garlic specifically in Canberra).

Making the long rows was fun, it felt more organised than, say, planting out the pumpkin and watching it weave everywhere over the last 4 months. At least I know the garlic will look nice and tidy when it's time to harvest them in November!

Different websites recommend different plant and row spacings (if at all). We decided to give ours more space because our experience so far on our organic garden patch is that things get really big. So we settled with around 20cm space (minimum 15cm) and about 30cm row space. We needed some space for the onions too...

To finish the garlic job, I dusted some loose soil over the top and watered some seasol liquid over the top. I was going to put the mulch back on but Tony said he never mulches, so I thought I'd give that a try. It also might get a bit more cooler at night without the mulch (although it'll also get hotter during the day). Cooler temperatures are needed to kick start the growing in garlic.

Planting garlic is fun, even if my wife gets to do the easiest job of all: popping in each clove into the holes that I make. :P

'map' of our garlic planting (April 2012)

The varieties we grew were (no. of cloves followed by variety):

• 23x Monaro Purple
• 39x Italian White
• 6x Italian Red
• 11x unknown brand from supermarket (it's sprouted, so unlikely to be from China; we think it's Australian White)

The first three were sourced from a local Goulburn biodynamic organic farmer. We tasted them before growing, and decided we liked the Monaro Purple and Italian White in particular, so we went again to buy more bulbs back in February. They were expensive, but it will be a one-off investment (if ours grows as intended).

So, we're expecting up to 79 large bulbs of garlic by late spring this year. Yay!

I also look forward to growing Tony's garlic and onion varieties (he says they're massive and have no small cloves)... he recommends planting the garlic in mid-May. He's a relaxed guy. Most other people in the community garden planted their garlic back in late March or early April, and they've all sprouted out already! I guess we're right in the middle... not too early, not too late.

We achieved many other things on our plot today. Apart from the endless weeding all around the plot, we also:

1. harvested four pumpkins that were finally ready (King Kong, the biggest 2.9kg pumpkin, will be given to our good friend fellow gardener at the community garden)
2. watered most areas
3. snapped the crazy sunchoke stems and created a nice mulch/barrier to stop the weeds from coming in (I'll post more about sunchokes in a separate post one day)
4. looked at other people's plots—it's a great way to learn
5. my wife harvested some end-of-season basil
6. dug out several kilos of dutch cream potatoes :)
7. had friendly chats with various other gardeners who came by to attend to their patches.

harvested four pumpkins today

It's way past bed time so I'll have to stop here. There's just so much happening each time we visit our patch that it's impossible to write about it all. But I will try to post one new entry a day, even if about a previous event. It's always more fun to write about a recent discovery or experience, so most of the time I'll write about what we did recently.