Growing garlic at home
GROW YOUR OWN GIANT GARLIC
Giant Garlic is relatively easy to grow in your own backyard garden. MARCH/APRIL is giant garlic planting time. It takes NINE months from planting to maturity so take this into account when choosing the location of your garlic patch. It also requires a moist free-draining soil and sunshine.
- Now that you have selected your site you need to prepare your soil with some good quality organic compost, and if your soil tends to be a bit acidic dig in some garden lime to bring the ph up to 6.9
- Select your cloves for planting. Make sure they are of a good size and quality. You can refrigerate them for a few days prior to planting. The bigger the clove planted the larger the bulb produced. Depending of course on the quality of your soil.
- Push your clove into the ground leaving the pointy tip protruding. Leave about a hand space distance between each clove planted.
- Once in the ground you need to cover them with some straw mulch hay. This serves four purposes.
- Weed suppression (garlic doesn't like competition).
- It helps to keep the soil temperature cooler.
- It assists in retaining moisture in the soil and
- It adds organic matter to your soil to feed the worms and microbes.
- In about 2/3 weeks you will notice green shoots spearing up through you mulch. You can now apply a nitrogen fertiliser like fish and kelp or blood and bone.
- In about October you will notice the flower bud forming, snap this off and allow the energy to go down into the bulb.
- In November the outer leaves will start to die off, wait until there is only about 3 green leaves left then it is time to harvest. About the beginning of December.
- Pull your plants up gently, strip back the outer leaves and tie into a bundle and hang somewhere dark and breezy to dry.
Good health to you and to our planet
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