Growing Garlic

I was on a garden tour this past weekend and one of the owners had rust on his garlic. It didn't seem to affect the actual garlic bulb. He showed us what it looked like on the stalk.

Wowie zowie, EP, your bulbs are huge! Very nice!!!

Both of you have lovely looking garlic, and the homemade basket looks great too.

I think there are only a few kinds of garlic that actually produce true seed (it would look kind of like onion seed I imagine). If you have that, I think it would be worth the experiment to plant it. On the other hand, most hardeck garlic have tiny little bulbils on the end of the scape that may produce garlic plants, but extremely small ones. These are not like other small seeds like broccoli, where a tiny seed produces a large plant.

I hope this thread will continue, such valuable information and so well presented. (Thanks MHF!). I tried a small patch of garlic this past season and gave my son's GF my first braid a few weeks back. I'll be doing up a much larger patch next year, and will likely need to go back to review instructions. And, will order some actual named varieties to plant rather than just using whatever the grocery store carries. Thanks all for great info and sharing of both successes and not-so-much.

Good luck to you bonehead. I wish you all success with your bigger patch. Is Cedarhome east or west of the Cascades?

Cedarhome is a small community NE of the town of Stanwood, so definitely on the wet side. I like to try to preserve the old names so folks don't forget about them. For example, we live on Lund Road, which had an 80-something year old child of the original homesteading Lunds living on it until a few years back. It has of course been resignated to a numbered road by the post office, but I use the real name whenever possible.

Edit: Note my typo "resignated" should have been "redesignated" but I rather like the error, might be a new word.

This message was edited Aug 12, 2010 6:24 PM

Good for you. I never like it when they change things. Guess that's a sign of my age. LOL

Rust is what I should have said, when I said fungus.

Who's in for round 2????? I have about half my garlic in the ground (put it in about 3 weeks ago) and still one more bed to plant. Today I'm going to prune dead branches off as many tress as I have energy for. Tomorrow maybe I'll work on the garlic. The issue is I need to weed the bed first and I can't even find the bed there are so many weeds!

Should we start a new thread for 2011 garlic?

I've been thinking about garlic, too. We just got back from seventeen days in France and today we have to butcher chickens. You can imagine what our garden looks like! I haven't even thought about a garden plan for next year, which I need to do before I put in the garlic cloves. And of course what with getting ready to go away, I didn't order any garlic, but I have some nice cloves from friends and I figured I can use those.

Sure, start that thread!

I started this thread about a year ago, and it is definitely planting time here in the Northwest. It is worth it to prepare the soil well by removing all weeds and with generous additions of compost since garlic is a long term crop, in the gropund for 9 months. Add lime too if your soil is acidic.

I am only doing a small planting this year since the soil borne allium fungus (White Rot)I have requires that I plant in a completely different location. Last June I only harvested 50 out of 250 plants. All the rest withered and died in May although they had been large, robust plants up until that point. I want to try and save an unusual variety (called 'Kenyan' by the person who gave it to me) that I have been growing for 10 years, and which is not available anywhere I can locate on the internet.

I'll get another thread going for thse who want to share experiences this coming year.

I think I will plant some in long plastic boxes in purchased soil. Not my favorite method by any means, but at least I will not have to see the rot take over at the end of the season. I'd better get going.....storm season is upon us.

I have thought about using planters of some kind also, but I do better with in-the -ground planting. It may be the most effective fungus protection though. Good luck with it!

New Thread: http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1136925/