I did it! I grew Garlic!

[Carol Dee]

View attachment 8392 (sorry)
She's doing great. Right now, just making it through this HOT weather.
I'm starting to make plans for her to visit the neighbor bull in Dec/Jan.
View attachment 8393

Looking Good.
AND I think our administrators NEED to add that Smiley to our choices. PERFECT> LOL

 

[journey11]

Very nice! Are they pictured in the same order as listed? I started to buy some Music last fall, but the place I was ordering from had already sold out, so I forgot about it. Let us know which one is your favorite.

 

[Lavender2]

Looks fantastic! If I was to roast garlic I'd want something like Music with large bulbs.

Thanks @Hal , Music did make the largest bulbs, it also seems to be the most pungent smelling. It is suppose to be somewhat sweet when cooked. Will let you know!

 

[MontyJ]

Congrats Lavender! It looks beautiful. I can't wait to get to the point where I can concentrate on gardening again. I already have my heart set on a dedicated garlic bed.

 

[Lavender2]

@thistlebloom , I will have to try some shish-ka-garlic. Do you marinate them at all or just grill.
Your store garlic, do you know if it was softneck? Did you mulch after planting?
Not sure if that would make a big difference, going into frozen ground.

I was looking at some softneck varieties to try, but I've read it's difficult in cold climates. A garlic farm in WI grows them so some varieties must be tough enough.

 

[Lavender2]

Those look great, we have tried several times with out much luck.

We lost ours a couple of years to flooding and I lost interest to try again, fall planting of anything is usually not my idea of a good time. But, if you like garlic, don't give up. If I can do it, believe me - I know you can!

 

[Lavender2]

Congradulations! They did really well for you. I find that garlic is easy for me. But I just get whatever the grocery store has to plant. How did you get your garlic looking so clean? When I pull mine out it still looks dirty even after brushing dirt off with my hands.

Mary

It's not highly recommended, but I lightly sprayed the dirt off. We have had 6" of rain in the past 2 weeks and my clay/mud would not shake off enough to get good drying. A garlic farm here in MN cleans their bulbs and has had no issues so ... I wish I could have waited for the soil to dry more but that might be a month!

I have read that some farms remove just the outer dirty skins after drying, before they are stored. Softneck have more layers of skins, not so much a chance the bulbs would be exposed.

 

[Lavender2]

Very nice! Are they pictured in the same order as listed? I started to buy some Music last fall, but the place I was ordering from had already sold out, so I forgot about it. Let us know which one is your favorite.

Thanks @journey11 , yes they are pictured in order. The Chesnok Red was not red striped and I thought I was harvesting them too early, but two days of drying and they are already showing lots of red. Whew, and almost too pretty to eat! Garlics are complicated.

I will surely report after our garlic tasting...

 

[Pulsegleaner]

That's more or less what I do. In my case, I sort of have to; most of mine comes out so dirty that there is actual mold on the outermost skin, mold that I know from experience will penetrate the rest of the bulb if given a chance.

I'd did pretty well this year on garlic (well, well for me) only about a dozen plants actually made it through as opposed to the closer to two dozen last year. However last year only two of the planted cloves actually broke into actual heads, and the bigger of those was only about the size of a cocktail olive. AND that one took about six years of being a round to get that far. In comparison more than half of the plants made multi clove heads, and they all did it in one year (the rounds from last year were really tiny, and none of them had enough juice to get through the winter, so all of this year's crop is clearly from the fresh material I started). most of which is about the size of a walnut with 2-4 cloves per head (in other words more or less what the parents looked like). And only two subsequently rotted, one of which was more or less doomed from when I pulled it (it has basically split so deep the clove was in the soil, and already molding.) Looks like doing as I did (sticking the cloves and their pot in the garage over the winter) works well.

 

[thistlebloom]

Lavender, turns out the store garlic was hardneck. I did mulch after banishing them to Siberia. I thought that I should at least try to do one thing right.

Oh, and yes I did marinate the garlic with all the other veggies for about 4 hours. I don't know if it actually made a difference with them though. But they were super fresh, I pulled the ones I was going to grill before the bulbs were technically ready. I gave the rest of the patch about 2 more weeks before harvest.