Download Growing monster garlic

The magic of garlic
Garlic is one of the most satisfying crops to grow in your garden, being one of those
plants that rewards you for very little effort. In these days of proliferating vampire
numbers, it has many uses, including warding off illness. At the first sign of any bird-flu
like illness, out comes the garlic. Ten quick chews later, my mouth is on fire and the
garlic ninjas are doing their work.
If you haven’t harvested your garlic yet, now is a good time. It’s best to let the ground dry
out first, usually not much of an issue in these parts. This keeps moulds at bay and lends
itself to much longer storage life. A good sign your garlic is ready is when two or three
side leaves start drying off. Be careful with that garden fork, I once sent a woofer out to
harvest our garlic crop, only to find that every other bulb of garlic had been brutally
stabbed through the heart, aaahhhhhhh! If you do accidentally stab a few bulbs, eat
them first.
I put the garlic into bunches of eight to ten bulbs and hang in a cool airy space to dry.
The garlic gets graded in these bunches, the biggest and best bulbs first and so on to
the smallest bulbs in the last bunch. Now that first bunch with all of your A & P show
stopping bulbaliscious garlic wonders.... doesn’t make it to your kitchen! These are your
next season’s cloves to plant. With garlic there’s a direct correlation between clove size
and bulb size. Size counts, so don’t plant the small ones!
Garlic is sooooo easy to grow, with some help from compost and water. I put the cloves
in the ground around the shortest day of the year with a handful of compost, add some
mulch on top and forget till harvest time. It’s easy to grow your supply for the year in a
small bed, or creatively in and around the herb or flower garden. Garlic is also a great
companion plant, keeping aphids away and reducing leaf curl on peach trees (note to
self, must try this one). The dry garlic leaves and stalks are a great carbon source for
your compost heap.
Not all garlic is made the same. There are two main sub-species, hard necks and soft
necks. Fairly self explanatory, really. The bonus of the hard necks is an early spring
harvest of the garlic ‘scapes’, the flower heads that shoot up. These can be fried,
battered or whizzed into pesto. The soft neck varieties are the ones you can plait and
display with pride and joy in your kitchen.
Around this region we’re lucky to have a great hard neck variety that can grow massive
under the right conditions. Check out the farmers market and local organic food store for
locally adapted hard or soft neck varieties. As a general rule don’t plant supermarket
garlic as it is sprayed with growth suppressants.