Image via Wikipedia It's kind of funny, when you cook alot, you don't tend to think where your ingredients come from. Coming from an Italian family, eating squash flowers in
scrambled eggs was the norm. So was eating TONS of
garlic. But the great thing was, it wasn't really that hard to grow. Wanna try it yourself? Come on, anybody can do it!
Let's go grow some garlic! Here's how...
You can buy garlic
bulbs at any good nursery in late fall or early winter. It's harder to
find seeds/seedlings. Then,
plant single
cloves (not a whole bell!) directly in the ground about six weeks before the
soil freezes. If you live in a milder climate, then you will plant your garlic in January or February for harvesting in late summer or early fall. You'll want to
choose a garden site that gets full sun. Even though garlic will grow in soil with any
pH from 5.0 to 8.0, it does best in the slightly acid range (6.2 to 6.8).
Dig into the dirt about 8 to 12
inches, and supplement the soil with plenty of compost to make sure the ideal happy medium of
fertility, good drainage and moisture retention. Be sure to dig out all traces of weeds; they'll easily choke off garlic's grasslike greenery. Only plant the largest cloves from the bell/bulb, and throw away any that are pitted or tinged blue-green - both are signs of mold. Pllant all of your unpeeled cloves, pointy end up (the pointy end is the top of the bell if you were using it to cook with, lol!), 2 inches deep and 5 inches apart. If you're going to plant the giant "elephant" garlic, change the depth to 3 inches and the spacing to 10 inches, Then, cover the plants with compost, and
mulch the bed to hold in moisture and kill off the weeds. Top them off with more mulch again after the ground freezes to protect plants from the cold.
Remove the mulch
come spring so that the sun can heat up the soil, then top the plants off with another fresh layer of mulch when new growth begins. If you want really large bulbs, cut back any flower stalks that might pop up. Give your garlic plants an
inch of water a week until the foliage turns yellow or falls over - sure signs that your bulbs are nearing maturity. You can always clip garlic leaves to use at any given time, but be sure not to take off more than 1/4 of a plant's top growth, or else you'll cut your potential bulb size. You can start harvesting your bulbs when about 3/4 of the tops are yellow.
Then it's time to start cooking!
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Image via WikipediaNOW we're cookin'!
