that's interesting! I must try that next year.

I think it also is supposed to repel carrot flies. I grow garlic mixed with lots of other plants and don't really think I've found anything that doesn't grow well with garlic. It is a great garden helper. Lots of folks make garlic tea or garlic/pepper tea to spray on other types of plants to repel pests. To me it seems easier just to grow the garlic right in there with the plants and then I don't have to mess with making and spraying the garlic tea.

Dawn, do you think I could move some garlic plants without killing them. I have a lot of garlic that I didn't harvest last year so there are many stalks growing close together (too close to mature). I have a bed of garlic, but this is just some that has been ignored for a couple of years.

Yes, I think you can move them without killing them, but you'll likely have to cut back the tops quite a bit so they don't wilt. It also will interfere with bulbing for this year, but you already know that. I would expect some transplant shock now that it is so warm already, but cutting back the tops severely and watering well should help the plants overcome that.

I'm thinking of moving some several-year-old-and-never-harvested garlic plants any day now myself. I want to move them from the back garden to scatter around the front garden as companion plants.

Or, either of us could plant companion type plants now from purchased organic garlic from the grocery store (since organic garlic would not have been sprayed with anti-sprouting sprays). I just don't see the point in buying new garlic to plant when I have overgrown garlic I can transplant.

Garlic is pretty forgiving about being moved as long as the gardener who is moving it doesn't expect it to produce bulbs just a few months after it is moved. I not saying it won't bulb up this summer after being moved this late, but I'd be shocked if it did.

I have carrots doing well right next to garlic (totally an accident.) Also, the most successful spinach and lettuce I've ever grown is growing between shallots at the moment. *shrug* That was a random choice as well.

I have a small bed of carrots growing next to onions and a few more growing next to the bed of garlic that I was talking about moving part of, but both were not planned as companion plants, just a happy accident I suppose.

I was just walking around my garden and thinking that some of my earliest tomatoes are now too tall for the flower pots to cover them if we should get a hail threat, so I guess I will be digging out larger pots for those today, just in case. I live outside the high risk area but I know that can change very quickly. I still have hoops over the onion beds so that would be easy enough to cover with greenhouse plastic. The strawberry bed has bird netting over it, so is probably OK. My potato plants are huge and they would take a beating if we got hail. I have lots of row cover, but it is thin and I would hate to have it ripped up. Frankly, I have so much in the ground that is growing nicely, it would be really bad to have it ripped up by a hail storm. I have never lost a garden to hail but always hate to hear that others have lost so much in these storms.

Thanks for the info Dawn. The garlic is so crowded that it isn't going to produce anyway, so moving some of it is worth a try. I have some growing in another place that is properly spaced.

Great info. I have a bunch of left over garlic, too.

Carol, I have covered up as much as I could in case we get the hail, but there's so many things now that are too big to cover that it is just ridiculous. I only used bird netting and the stronger deer netting because I didn't want the heat buildup associated with heavier row cover and I do think it is likely hail would shred the lighter-weight row covers. My potato plants are huge like yours so they are on their own. Even 5-gallon buckets and molasses feed tubs wouldn't cover the potato plants, and they've grown taller than the hoops, so that method is out as well.

Today I'll lift the netting-covered hoops long enough to harvest sugar snap peas and beans. The peas aren't totally covered but they mostly are. I already harvested a bunch of green onions yesterday, and lettuce, spinach and kale as well, and tomatoes. I am trying not to leave anything out there for the hail to destroy if it already is large enough to harvest and use, except I didn't harvest the small to medium-sized cabbage heads.

Our forecast high yesterday was 82 but we hit 87 so heat buildup would be a major problem under heavy row cover today if we get as warm as yesterday. We aren't supposed to get quite that warm, but we weren't supposed to get that warm yesterday either.

We are in the Moderate risk area and, while the prospect of tornadoes scares me more, experience living here tells me that we are more likely to get the hail than to have a tornado, so I'll just finish up doing whatever I can to protect the plants today. I will have to move all the flats of plants I'm taking to the Spring Fling back into the greenhouse before the storms start. They've been sitting out on tables in the yard for 2 or 3 weeks now, but I think it is better to get them back inside just in case hail arrives. If we get the worst-possible-case hail in baseball to softball sizes, the greenhouse likely won't survive either, but at least the plants have a chance if they're inside of it.

My bigger worry isn't about the plants or about a tornado hitting our house, it is that Tim gets off work at D-FW at 4 pm and will be driving home as storms are developing to our west and heading our way. He's had to dodge tons of tornado warnings and hail the last couple of springs while on the road (he narrowed avoided a tornado near Sanger last year that flipped over vehicles on I-35 that didn't exit and seek shelter like he did), and this one is shaping up to be another one of those types of years. By the time he leaves work, I'll be indoors (hopefully with all the free-ranging poultry herded back into their coops/covered chicken runs already, though sometimes they are stubborn about going in before dark) and I'll have the TV on either a local channel if storms are imminent or on The Weather Channel if it still is quiet here. I'll have a fully charged cell phone and a fully charged laptop so I can track the storms if I'm sitting in the tornado shelter. My garden never gets hit by hail in a dry old drought year when the plant growth is slow and the plants have had to struggle to get any momentum going, but just give us a rainy year with a gorgeous spring garden and the hail comes calling.

Dawn

Dawn, Guess Tim made it home OK, huh? The timing was a little slower than they expected, I think. Looks like you are 'under the gun' right now so I hope you are in the shelter. There is a warning around you and another thunderstorm right behind. Stay safe.

He did, but then the internet went out so I couldn't tell y'all that. It was crazy for a while---it was quiet until we decided to go to bed (Tim's alarm going off at 3:45 a.m. makes every morning from Mon-Fri start too early) and then all kinds of craziness broke out. We were within maybe 5 minutes of going to the tornado shelter as the Texas tornado warning tracked towards us, but then the rotation weakened and we got to stay inside the house.

While Thackerville was sounding sirens and opening the tornado shelter due to the tornado in Cooke County, damage reports out(buildings roofless or collapsed, power lines down, trees down, wrecks in blinding rain) were coming in from the west end of the county. That area got hit hard by a severe thunderstorm that moved from the Wichita Falls area through western Love County as it headed for Lone Grove and Ardmore. There also is tornado damage to our southeast in the Whitesboro area. We had a rowdy thunderstorm but no damage, as far as I know, to our house.

My only disappointment? Medium to large hail did not fall and thin all the fruit trees for me, so today I'll be thinning fruit. It is too wet to garden, but I can pot up plants for the Spring Fling. I would mow the pastures if they weren't so wet.

So...I was surprised by the number of folks here who had garlic that seems to perpetually be in their garden. I guess my frame of mind has been "plant when I'm supposed to - yank it out when I"m supposed to - hope it made a crop that I can store and use" but y'all seem to be doing something much more fluid than that? I have an herb bed and one covered bed I try to keep going year-round, stocked with things that I can harvest at any time...is garlic a candidate for some of that space?

Also, this thing about moving garlic Dawn provided is super helpful because I ended up with some volunteer tomato plants (I was so amazed when people were talking about getting some of those on other threads and then boom! I found 3 in my former tomato, now cutting flower bed!) I'm going to move some garlic to make room for those tomatoes I guess!

Kate, I stick garlic cloves around plants I want protected and leave them to do their thing. You harvest eating garlic when the leaves start to die back. I never thought about it, but I've never seen the "protective" garlics do that, maybe because they're planted in the warm season and hit the dormant season in winter, then green back up in spring. Since most were store bought softneck garlic they don't go to seed. I've got a couple of pots this year that look like they have little green onions in them, but I know it's garlic. The hardneck garlic I plant makes scapes with "bulbils" in them that could be used the same way. I had several come up in my compost pile, and when I planted garlic last fall I had too many bulbs for the space and I ran around sticking it in random empty spots. My garden is pretty new, so I can see how in a few years I could have lots of random garlic plants.

Kate, Set your garden free, and your gardener's mind free, and stop doing things the way you are supposed to. (grin) I promise you that you'll be pleased with the results. Once I stopped being a "good girl" and doing everything right, proper and by the book in the garden, I started having a lot more fun and my garden became more productive and more beautiful.

I have some garlic that has been in the same place for 4 or 5 years. It protects in-ground fruit trees from some insect pests, and from voles. I've never had voles damage the roots of the in-ground fig tree since I added the garlic to that area. Prior to that, the voles ate so much of the roots that the tree had almost no roots left and was turning into the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Of course, I do grow some garlic for harvesting at the appropriate, but I also have protective garlic scattered around the garden, along with onion chives, garlic chives and perennial onions. All of them are strongly protective of many other kinds of plants.

Garlic will grow happily almost anywhere as long as the soil drains well.

I used to have a separate herb garden, but now I mix in herb plants into all the raised beds in my garden. In the main garden's largest tomato bed, we have basil, borage, and chamomile growing in it, along with Laura Bush petunias, dianthus, moss rose, echinacea, begonias, some perennial flower I don't remember planting and won't know what it is until it blooms, lettuce, violas and, oh yes, the tomato plants. A different smaller raised bed whose main crop is tomatoes also has petunias, marigolds, triple curled parsley, fennel (some that I planted and some that are volunteers), hot peppers and pineapple sage. A different tomato bed has a trellis across the back covered with sugar snap peas, a row of determinate tomatoes across the front, and lettuce, marigolds, dill, chives, dianthus, one French hollyhock plant and sweet alyssum mixed into it. Yet another raised bed with tomatoes in it also has a row of hot peppers, and those two rows are interplanted with nasturtiums, marigolds, moss rose and begonias, then at the far east end of that bed there's 6 or 8 cabbage plants with chamomile, sweet alyssum and catmint there to protect the cabbage from pests.

My garden is a crazy quilt, albeit right now a crazy quilt under hoops covered with bird netting, which has some of the plants feeling scrunched up, hemmed in and whining and wanting to stretch out and grow. Mixing everything together means that literally every day is a surprise as something new pops up and grows and blooms.

As for tomato volunteers, they are about my least favorite volunteer and here's why. I grow a mix of heirlooms and hybrids. If I could know that any tomato volunteer that pops up was from an open-pollinated variety and would come true from seed, I could keep them and know they'd be something great. However, since there's a chance they could be hybrids, they may or may not come true from seed and they may or may not produce something worth eating. So, while I love tomato plants in general and grow a huge number of them, I almost never keep a volunteer and let it grow. I weed out tiny tomato volunteers all spring and summer long, preferring to use our precious garden space for varieties we grew from seed and that we know will produce a harvest worth having. Maybe if I had more space, I'd let some live. One year I did that, but I planted them outside the fenced garden so that I could move tomato hornworms to them when I found hornworms on my tomato plants. Well, that was sort of a waste because I probably don't see but 2 to 4 hornworms a year, despite growing no less than 100 tomato plants each season. I think the herbs get credit for the lack of hornworms.

Amy, I do have random garlic plants everywhere, in and out of the garden. It is hard to be unhappy about too much garlic. Judging from the way it grows out in unfenced areas, I'd say that none of the garden plant-munching wildlife here likes to eat garlic.

Dawn