It’s fun to try something new in your garden. This year, how about garlic? It doesn’t go into the ground until later on in fall, so the planting is done in delightfully cool weather. It’s very satisfying to go out onto a cool porch or into the garage where they’re hung, drying, and cut a bulb of your own down for the boeuf bourguignon. Particularly if you’ve grown a variety that you don’t usually stumble upon in the grocery stores, not even the fancy, esoteric ones. Taste, texture and pungency are different from the ones you can usually find in the supermarket, too.
Garlic is a member of the Allium family, which also includes onions, shallots and leeks. There are two main kinds of garlic: hard neck and soft neck. Most of what you find at the supermarket is soft neck garlic, and most of that is grown in China. Soft neck garlic, which has a soft, scallion-like shoot that makes it possible to braid when drying, tends to store better than the hard neck varieties, which need to be used within about six months of harvest for best flavor and quality. Hard neck has (surprise) a hard central stalk. Soft neck garlic has an ad-hoc cluster of smaller cloves around the neck, while hard neck varieties have five or six cloves ringed around that single hard stem. Cloves in hard neck tend to be larger than in soft neck varieties, though it varies from one to another variety and bulb. Hard neck garlic offers a bonus not available in soft neck. The hard neck or stem, which grows quite tall in spring, also produces an elegant ‘scape,’ like long a green curly fry, that you can clip, leaving the upright stem and its leaves still growing along with the bulb, which is still in the ground. You can use this scape in a variety of ways – one of our favorites is to grill it with a little olive oil and salt and pepper and eat it with our fingers like a French fry.
For next summer’s harvest, plant garlic anywhere from mid- October through December. Garlic needs sun and loamy, freely draining soil to do well. It will rot if it sits too long in saturated soil. A raised bed is usually perfect. You can plant the cloves from the garlic bulbs that are right now being sold in the farmers’ market, buy some from Kingstown Farm Home and Garden (it should be arriving in couple of weeks) or order bulbs from a catalogue house.
To plant, separate the cloves from the bulb. Be careful not to nick them, which can let in pests and disease. Take care also to keep the ‘footprint,’ the bottom of the clove where it attached to the base, intact. Separate the cloves within 24 hours of when you plan to plant so the root nodule at the footprint doesn’t dry out, making it easier for the clove to set roots quickly. Set cloves about a knuckle-and-a-half deep and 12-18 inches apart, footprint down/pointed end up. Cover with soil. A top-dressing of compost helps. Mulch with something lightweight – straw, chopped leaves, reeds, alfalfa hay, swamp grass. You may see shoots begin to grow in late fall. These will die back in winter, but new ones will emerge in spring.
Both kinds of garlic are ready to harvest anywhere from late June to early August next year depending on the variety you plant and the growing conditions. Dig them up, shake or wipe off most of the soil with a rag and hang them in an airy place out of the sun to cure. A garage or porch works well.
Kingstown Farm Home and Garden
7121 Church Hill Road – MD Rt. 213
Chestertown, MD
410-778-1551
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