Kitchen Garden Forum

How is everyone doing this year? It's been a funny one, weather wise. Strangely, it seems to have helped my garlic to grow about as well as I can ever remember.

One of my batch is an early variety (Early Wight) and I dug it up over the weekend:


There's a few more pictures here:
http://www.pbase.com/cmalsingh/2006

I hope mine look that good; well done!

Am green with envy, don't think mine will reach that size! Were you playing tennis and harvesting at the same time?

My garlic dont seem to be doing much. I dug one up but the bulb is tiny. Lets hope they are going to have a sprint finish Really wanted my own garlic this year but its not looking hopeful
Seedling

No, I wasn't playing tennis (probably just talking a load of b**ls, as usual!).

> "Lets hope they are going to have a sprint finish "

You might yet be in luck, depending on your variety. I have two others still growing, one of which has almost no bulb visible yet. If you haven't yet, put some tomato feed on.


Meanwhile I think there may be two reason this crop has done well:

a) I made a real effort to keep the patch weeded this year. Garlic doesn't compete well with weeds and buying a hoe really helped me (apart from the fact that if used badly, it can slice right through a growing stem....!)

b) I added some feed, in the form of bonemeal, plus occaisional tomato feed about 2-3 times over the last 4 months.

Finally, I did spend rather a lot on the seed. This probably doesn't make it good value for money, but It's always nice to get a bumper crop. See this thread for some background on this:
viewtopic.php?t=998&highlight=

Ok, first attempt at posting a picture. Hope it works. This is (hopefully) my early garlic. Lots more to come!
http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g63/A ... arlic1.jpg

OK, not quite what I was hoping for, but at least you can see it!

Angi thats a fine picture, at least you have managed to get one up, so to speak.
I still can't get my head round this technology stuff.

Kind regards Old Herbaceous.

Theres no fool like an old fool.

Angi - your photo wouldn't look out of place in a frame! A work of art. We haven't lifted our garlic yet (6 different varieties from IoW), but I hope it ends up looking as good as the above examples.

Angi, yours look a lot lusher than my Purple 'early' garlic - 24 hours after harvesting ...

This really is turning into a 'mine is bigger than yours competition! I think I'll slink off for a quick weep at my weeny garlic and leave the big boys and girls to it...

I'm a little shy of praise, but thanks for all the compliments. I got a new camera for my birthday and have been snapping away on the plot. I think we're really lucky here as the South Downs protect us from the north and the Isle of Wight shelters us too. Last year's garlic harvest was, quite frankly, embarrassing, so I'm delighted so far.

Angi wrote:the Isle of Wight shelters us too.

Hi Angi, do you ever get to go over to the Garlic Farms on the Isle of Wight? Having bought stuff from them before, I'd be interested to see whole fields of the stuff.

You hear stories that when towns in europe are having their garlic festivals, even airline pilots flying above can smell it. Conjures up similar pictures for boats in the channel!

Well, I bit the bullet yesterday and decided to harvest the garlic; the foliage was so badly affected with rust it was mostly dry already!
Anyway, I was pleasantly suprised with size of the bulbs, the purple necked was overall pretty average, but the Albigensian garlic was by far the biggest! The Solent Wight was weeny, so have left a couple of rows in as they had the greenest folige in the hope that they will fatten up a bit. A question though, if I save some cloves of the biggest Albigensian garlic to plant later this year, will those plants also be susceptible to rust? Or is it the soil in the area I grew them that might retain it?

Hi Deb,
Regret to inform you that Rust is an Airbourne complaint so it could have been blown in from anywhere.