Garlic Forever!

Yesterday would have to have been the proudest moment I have experienced in my veggie garden……….I harvested 21 of the most deliciously round, big and perfectly gorgeous garlic I have ever seen! I dug them out with the biggest grin on my face, each bigger and better than the next, it was like Christmas morning for my giddy little green thumb. I had even forgotten that I had planted two varieties so when the pinks turned into whites the excitement and anticipation of what was to come was like a lucky dip!

Garlic has forever been one of those perennial bulbs that most people (including me) think is difficult to grow. But it’s really not! Back in late April a dear friend gave me some Garlic bulbs from his garden and said put these in. I thought sure why not……he also passed on some amazing Russian variety that I put in the garlic basket inside and we managed to cook our way through it and only realised after I went to plant them and then thought…..oh……… Our mate Max said put them in, leave them, weed them and then you will have Garlic to dig up in late Spring, so we said ok.

We slammed the individual garlic cloves in the ground in late April, marginally under the surface, watched it grow, weeded, watched it grow, weeded (mainly peas that germinated from the pea straw), watched it grow and harvested in November (when the foliage had started to dry out)……that is it!

It is our second year growing garlic and it has definitely proved our most successful. I feel like there were a few things that we had right this year that have contributed to our bumper crop. Keeping in mind that we still had success last year however the size of this year’s production is quite impressive. Our veggie garden beds are coming into their fourth year of use and I feel like it has taken this long to get our soils to a high quality. Before we plant out each season’s produce, we add a mix of sugar cane or pea straw mulch (pea straw has a higher nitrogen content), horse poo, chook poo and sometimes a fertiliser of some sort, we used Yates Blood and Bone this year. We give it all a good water and leave it to settle for a few weeks before planting. We are conscious to rotate our crops through our garden beds so not as to exhaust the soils of the required nutrients for each plant. Always making sure we are putting back in what we are taking out.

So back to what we had right. The soils were bang on this year (not that we really knew at the time), the product we put in the ground was high-quality (thanks to Max and Jocie) and please don’t judge me, but we planted this Garlic crop by the moon! We follow an app called Moon & Garden and it tells us when it’s good to plant what and what gardening tasks you can or shouldn’t undertake on any given day. So we planted by the moon and well let us just say the proof is in the pudding!

Happy Garlicing

Seed you Soon!