Garlic

Zeedman

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Mid-October has proven to be the best time for me to plant garlic, when the weather allows me to do so. Today was sunny (or started that way) with very little wind, the soil was fairly dry, and rain expected tomorrow... so it was "go" time.

The raised bed was already built & full of soil. I added a little manure, and made a quick pass with a small tiller to turn it under. After raking the bed smooth, I marked the holes, dropped in the cloves, and DW followed to push them to the right depth & cover them. Then we covered the bed with timothy hay saved for that purpose. All together, we planted 150 cloves, with metal markers between varieties. The garlic varieties are:
  • Carpati
  • Dubna Standard
  • Estonian Red
  • German White
  • Krasnodar Red
  • Ron's Single Center
  • Special Idaho
  • Vic's
  • An unknown hardneck survivor from my previous collection, which appeared as a volunteer in a flower bed
As we were planting, we noticed that it was getting cloudy, and colder... and about halfway through the process, it began to snow. ❄ Just flurries, so we bundled up & kept planting. The wind had started picking up, so we were glad to finish, and drive home with the car heater turned up to max. When we got home, we found the temperature had dropped to 34 F. :eek: @digitS' , I seem to remember you wondering if snow might come early this year... so this is all YOUR FAULT! :lol:
 

digitS'

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Here's incentive, @flowerbug .

A friend was the original source of our garlic. I get the idea that she is something of a garlic connoisseur. She has determined that the original garlic (name unknown to me ) is not nearly as wonderful as what she has grown more recently (and what is wrong with original, also unknown :hu). She brought us several of those bulbs.

They are in garden soil as of this week.

Steve
 

flowerbug

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Here's incentive, @flowerbug .

A friend was the original source of our garlic. I get the idea that she is something of a garlic connoisseur. She has determined that the original garlic (name unknown to me ) is not nearly as wonderful as what she has grown more recently (and what is wrong with original, also unknown :hu). She brought us several of those bulbs.

They are in garden soil as of this week.

Steve

hardneck or softneck? :)
 

GottaGo

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agree with the moisture control being a problem i'd rather not face. further south it may also just get too hot inside a container unless it is very large and has enough thermal mass.

as for root depth, you have to consider planting depth plus size of the bulb and then inches below that for the roots. so it does end up to be a rather sizeable container for all that.
Good points.
The container was roughly 8", so the bulb 2-3" down, left another 5 for roots, and 3-4" of mulch up top for insulating factors. The side of the container (black plastic) facing south-east, I wrapped with white plastic for heat deflection.

As experiments go, I will monitor. If worse comes to worse, I'll have to move it to another area where it has less exposure to the direct sun. Benefits of having a bobcat (tonka toy) at hand. 👍
 

flowerbug

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I planted my elephant garlic about a week ago. I pulled what was left of the okra and cleaned out the bed. That is when I noticed I already had 2 garlics already coming up from the corms I had missed last year.

yeah, some of them can be pretty tricky. :)
 
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