zqnmegan, maybe the flavor is more intense because you crushed it first, that activates the enzymes in the garlic to produce more allicin. Do you get the skins off when it's dry, or just after crushing it? Or do you leave the skins on?

Does anyone crush garlic using the side of a knife?

happydayhey, I use a zyliss garlic press that allows several cloves at a time to be crushed and fish out the skins between each lot of garlic. a small skewer or paring knife helps to prise out the stubborn bits of skin that get stuck. yes the flavour would be brought out by the crushing and dehydrating, can never use store bought again - no comparison in the flavour:)

Well, the soil at my garlic site was finally dry enough for me to till yesterday. We also finished cracking the last bulbs yesterday, so as soon as I got off work today, DW & I began planting. With a big rain storm on the way, we took along some LED lights, and continued planting after sunset. Looking at the farm fields around us, it seems that a lot of farmers had the same idea... they are working under lights, trying to get their soybeans in before the rain.

Everything I had planned is planted; 32 garlic varieties, and 5 winter-hardy onions. Should be about 900 garlic plants total. I'll lay down hay after the ground either dries out again, or freezes.

One of the onions planted is Catawissa. It had exceptionally large topset bulbils this year (many 1" across), so I planted a large bed of them. I'm hoping for some ground bulbs next year that are large enough to be usable. The bulbs don't store well, but they are very strong flavored; I've been wanting to try making a strong onion powder from them for years.

Congrats on getting your garlic and onions in zeedman! No drilling with an auger this year :) Looks like the rain/snow has moved east of you now but hopefully you got enough to water in the new plantings a bit.

About 20-30% of my garlic has sprouted so far and I will try to get some mulch on it sometime in November. I have the week of Thanksgiving off which gives me plenty of time to mulch, fill compost bins, and harvest and process my horseradish. Hoping to get some venison in the freezer as well.

We had 2"+ of rain, so the garlic is well watered. Still no hard freeze in the long-term forecast, so there should be time for some root growth.

Yeah same here. Lots of rain, 3+ inches over the last week and a half (sorely needed), hard freeze keeps missing, soil temps probably around 50F after all that cold rain and a hard ground freeze is probably a month away.

Our daytime highs have finally dropped out of the 90's. I put the bulbils in pots and sunk them into the beds. 40 of Brown Saxon and 20 of Blanak. They had been in the refrigerator since last May, along with the Iowa German White rounds. I had a dozen small cloves when I broke up the first year rounds. I had started with 12 bulbils and harvested 10 plants that yielded 12 cloves. Much better than I expected. The rounds also went in pots. The main crop still has a lot of chilling to do. I got my seed from Fillaree and Yong Farms mid September. The 10 week ones will go in last week of November and the rest mid December. I plan to hay much this year. I hope to slow to ground heating in the spring to get another week or so of clove development.

Still mud in my garden. Supposed to be lots of sun and mild next week, we will see what happens then. Never planted anything this late before. It used to be that the ground was frozen up by now, but this year we keep getting rain and mild temps.

My garlic that was planted October 15 has started to break above ground. I am going to wait for the first freeze to mulch. I prepared my soil by tilling it with my SnoJoe cultivator; leveling the dirt and making holes with a broom stick about 4 inches apart in rows about 10 inches apart. I just dropped the cloves, root first into the holes. I did not water; just covered the holes.

I just planted my first garlic planting ever! I ordered a hardneck sampler and ended up with 21 cloves (3 heads) German Giant, 16 cloves (2 heads) Russian Red and 8 cloves (2 heads) Music. I planted 3 rows of 15 plants in a 2.5x8' bed, 6" apart with 8" between rows. The bed was pretty moist and we're expecting rain tomorrow, so I didn't water, just filled in the holes loosely. I'll check it tomorrow after the rain to make sure everything is still covered. What are everyone's thoughts on mulching? Do it now, wait a while, don't bother?

Where you are winter mulch helps avoid frost heaving during freeze/thaw cycles. Wait until the ground is frozen. The mulch will keep it that way pretty much all winter, which is what you want. Pull aside or loosen the mulch so the plants can grow up through it in the spring. Then a decent mulch will keep down weed competition and keep bed moisture uniform reducing or eliminating the need for watering. If you have not raised the bed, you may have rot problems regardless of whether you mulch or not or when you do it. Farther west we have less seasonal moisture and so less rot. I seldom winter mulch here in Minneapolis (garlic is fully hardy without it), but I do try to mulch in the spring once there is decent growth to 6 or 8 inches. That is for weed and moisture control, else I have to water and do far too much hand weeding.

Thanks OldDutch! This is a raised bed, so hopefully rot won't be a problem. I'll start collecting leaves now, but at the rate we're going weather-wise, the ground won't be frozen until February. It's 70 degrees today!

I've never head of German Giant but I suspect it is another AKA for the porcelain type often referred to as German Extra Hardy, German White, German Stiffneck, and Northern White. If so it is the garlic that consistently grows the biggest and best for me.

I would also suggest shredding the leaves well before mulching the garlic with them. It will help in the late winter when the garlic begins to grow again. Whole leaves tend to pack down under snow and the new growth often grows sideways under the mulch until liberated. Last winter my garlic started growing in earnest in mid February here in Missouri when the soil thawed and I pulled all but about 2" of the shredded leaf mulch off at that time.

Have fun with the garlic...it is one of my favorite crops! Come back to the allium forum if/when you have any more questions.

For mulch I prefer wheat straw, which I run through the lawn mower to chop it up a bit, if I have the time. Wheat straw tends to have very few weeds, far fewer than oats straw or any kind of hay.

For leaves, run them through the mower with a bagger on. You can also let the grass grow a bit and bag the leaves right off the lawn with the mower, provided you do not use a weed and feed lawn fertilizer. The added green from the grass doesn't hurt a thing and adds a bit of fertilizer.

Avoid heavy leaves like sycamore, Norway and sugar maple. They pack down tending to smoother whatever you plant under them as well as not letting the soil breath. Shattering leaves like elm and silver maple are perfect.

Well I finally went ahead and planted the garlic. The ground was still wetter than I would have liked, but it is already later than I have ever planted before. BTW I still have not been frosted here in Minneapolis and I still have good sweet banana peppers hanging on fully leafed out plants.
All the garlic held real well except the Vietnamese Red. Most of that had already dried out. Even the Xian and the Japanese held much better; so we see if what I planted makes.
Here is my garden plan. The squares are 3'x3'. The rectangles are 3'x4.5'. And the tulips stripes are 1' wide each. Everything including the tulips was raised and dug out of my own beds last summer.

Planted my garlic, watered it in a bit and then left for 2-1/2 weeks. We got plenty of rain while I was gone and the earliest varieties were up and going strong (8: to 10" tall.) Lucked out this time, eh? As usual the German Xtra Hardy are waiting for a good chill as are the Korean Reds but Music and Early Italian Purple are up at present. Have to get out and remove weeds sometime soon.

Nice layout Dutch!! What did you use to draw that up?

About 2/3 of my garlic has sprouted over all but a couple types are really stragglers. Only 2 of 18 Estonia Red have sprouted and only 3 of 12 Metechi. Chesnok red and Siberian are both 100% up and German White was at about 80%.

Planted my main garlic beds:

The front left is Chinese chives, front right are all German Red, 12 rows of 20 each. The far bed is 21 rows (3 sections of 7 rows) of various varieties, each row about 40 plants each. On the left are some herbs.

In the background is my grapevine area, about 48 vines. Trellis should be up next year. Looking to brew my own wine :-) Not blend with garlic though....

Here is my last year's bulbil bed. Not sure how many survived. Did not dig them.

Below is last year's garlic bed. I'd expect a lot of volunteer garlic plants here. All are German Red.

Having experimented with different planting dates, I now plant out first week in November. In my climate, this usually keeps any top growth below the mulch while allowing good root growth. I have planted as late as mid-December and had a fine crop.

Mine went in the ground yesterday: 285 Music, 95 Russian Red and 95 Estonian Red. Watered them well, but will hold off on the mulch for a few days since we are having lovely sunny weather.

Tom in VA

Jack,

I generally use .gif for drawing and plans, and that in Neopaint 4, which can also do quite a number of other formats including animated gifs. For a static image like this one Microsoft's Paint would work just fine and it can save in quite a number of formats now, too, inlcuding still gifs and jpgs. It is a whole lot more flexible than it used to be. For display I generally use Irfanview. Neopaint is a relatively inexpensive license and worth every penny IMO. Version 5 can also do layers. Irfanview is freeware and also worth every penny. :-) Paint comes with your Windows installation, generally under Accessories, being as close to a universal drawing program as there is for PC.

BTW Neopaint has the rare license allowance to install one license on as many machines as you wish just so long as you only use one at a time. I go back with Neopaint to Ver 3.2 in DOS, and that is some years!

We just had our first light freeze (29 degrees) in Northern VA. My intention was to cover my garlic with mulch after the first freeze, but I am uncertain if it is too early. Any advice?

Charlie - You can do it now or wait a bit longer if you want. It shouldn't matter either way at this time as long as the ground is not frozen solid yet. You just want to have the mulch in place before the soil goes thru cycles of freeze/thaw/freeze that can cause frost heave and rip the established roots from the plants. Here that often happens more in late winter than in early winter. Many people such as Dutch living in frigid Minnesota don't always mulch their garlic over the winter.

Dutch - thanks for the info. Being in IT you would think that I would be more tech savvy but I tend to stick with tried and true antiquated technology like excel spreadsheets. I usually avoid computers like the plague when not at work.

Garlic is hardy enough that it does not need to be mulched for protection. You mulch to conserve moisture or in winter to keep the ground frozen during warm spells to avoid frost heaving your plants out of the ground when you get a freeze/thaw alternating cycle going. Best to wait until your ground freezes, and then mulch it to keep it that way until spring thaw.

Jack,

LOL I am also in IT although the new boss renamed it "Technical Services" . Most of what I do is phone support primarily involving relatively minor problems with our mainframe function. I am first call on weekend for our whole West Region. I either fix it or call in the big money folks. I most certainly am not a programmer although I use some home made scripts and batch files nearly every work shift.

You want old fashioned? I still have a functioning DOX box, Open DOS 7.3 actually. At work I use Outlook, Excel, Access etc and IE when I have to. At home FireFox Thunderbird and Open Office. Either place I prefer Notepad if I can use it for whatever comes up. Right now I am testing Notepad ++ which adds column selection over the old Notepad's line only.

EDIT: I am also testing Akelpad. On both of them ALT-Shift and then mark lets you select columns. Both are also free. We use EXTRA as the mainframe emulator at work. It adds column selection right into the mouse mark, also Copy and Append in the right click menu (but both in EXTRA only) for building onto an existing clipboard which is real handy for EXTRA since long files are only displayed a page at a time.

I am growing much less garlic than most of you, but it's my first time trying it and I have only one 4' x 6' bed (with other vegetables in it). I'm doing SFG so I have 2 squares of 4 Music garlic each (8 plants total). Planted about three weeks ago, and our first frost is this weekend, but I covered the soil with mulch (shredded leaves) immediately after planting. Was this wrong? Should I uncover it?

Laura, I honestly don't think it matters much either way. I don't think garlic really needs it, it is super hardy. But the mulch is standard practice. Just be sure come spring that the plants aren't suffocated with mulch.

Here is my small garlic patch with 5 varieties planted in it. The bed is only about 6X4 and in the one to the right I planted bulbils which I probably planted too deep. Nothing has come up so far.

My garlic is up!!!!!!!!! We have had insanely warm weather over the past 2 weeks and I noticed a lone sprout through the leaf mulch about a week ago. I went out this morning and it looks like nearly all of my planted cloves have sprouted! I am not sure about removing all of the mulch just yet, though, as March is often very cold/snowy here. Still, it's so exciting to see my first-ever garlic bed coming to life!!!

Isn't it cool to have something green and edible growing this early in the year! Don't forget to give them some nitrogen fertilizer pretty soon and then every 3 or 4 weeks until around mid May. I'm leaving my mulch on for a couple more weeks too and then I'll pull all but about an inch off.

Mine is up too! It's been super warm here lately (60-70 degrees) but it's going to snow this weekend. Hope the extreme temperature shift won't do any harm.

Rockin' and rollin' in 6B. Nitrogen already applied. Highs in the 70's here for days! Supposed to drop down to 24° Friday night, which should be ok...

By the way, LoneJack, the two monsters at the far end are the theoretical 'Thermadrone.'

Nothing very big up here in Minneapolis, but I can just barely row the Xian. 60 degrees here in a couple of days this week, too, and tonight and tomorrow rain turning to snow through tomorrow. It all got a top dressing of Milorganite just this afternoon. The next time the snow all melts off, it should be go time for all of them.

Dutch,

I used to sell Milorganite (basically for lawns) when I worked at a nursery, but quit recommending it for veggie gardens because it contained heavy metals (cadmium, lead). Have they found a way to eliminate those?

Hortster, that is an old - and often contentious - topic of discussion. I think there was even a recent thread about milorganite in the Veggie Forum. Some swear by it, some swear at it. ;-)

The freeze came so late last year that even planted late, some of my garlic had just begun to emerge... then it snowed, which put a stop to further development. I haven't been out to check on it lately, probably should have given our record-setting thaw. Several inches of snow expected tonight & tomorrow, so Spring isn't quite here yet. Nature has a twisted sense of humor, it would not surprise me if February & March trade places this year.

Looking good horster! Those 'Thermadrones' do look a lot bigger than the rest so maybe they are actually Elephant garlic. One question...why is all of your leaf mulch up against the fence? :-)

I hope you guys up north are hanging in there! It sounds like some places are getting blizzard conditions

horster, back when I did lawns, I used Milorganite exclusively. I think the heavy metals argument is obsolete, if it ever was really a factor. There is even officially an organic version now IIRC. Milorganite emphatically claims there is no heavy metal issue. Originally wasn't it supposed to be the greenskeepers' darling for golf courses? I know this, even where I spilled it I got no burned spots, just really green grass.

FWIW anyway, most cities require special recycling handling of the sources of heavy metals these days. It used to be far more casual. I suspect that if it was originally contaminated, it wasn't the only dry fertilizer that was, many of which were never outed.

No blizzard here in Minneapolis. I expected snow overnight, but the ground is bare this morning. South and east of us again. Once more, we in Minneapolis end up north of winter.

Good for you...no shoveling!

It looks like the storm is splitting the metro Dutch. Looks like both my brother's house it Stillwater and his property south of Eau Clair are picking up a good amount.

Dutch, Milorganite, as we otherwise know as processed Milwaukee sewage sludge, used to sell like hotcakes for "anytime" fertilizer applications including the middle of summer. I remember that after watering it in it became somewhat odoriferous for a day or two. We used to sell it as an off-season shot in the arm for cool season grasses in the summer's heat.

LoneJack, my leaf mulch is against the fence because my two 8' diameter compost piles have been full to the top and need to settle! I still need to screen the oldest pile to the left of them. I've grown garlic since 2005 and haven't mulched once, with no apparent damage. I worry about wind abrasion more than freeze/thaw frost heave.

LOL

I know where Milorganite comes from and has since the 1920's. I buy composed animal manure by the bagful for my gardens every year to go along with coir and the bagged fertilizer. I got a real sandy loam here; I grew up on a clay loam with a clay subsoil (IOW good old Iowa black dirt). So I had to learn how to handle the ground I got now. When you get the combination just right and perhaps a bit heavy, there is a very sweet aroma to the ground, I wouldn't say that it stunk however.

Back in the day my father would plow down a large spreader load straight from the barn into the house garden every fall. This is part of how you keep a piece of ground producing intensively for a century. At one time that house garden measured a full acre and my mother was working in it every day when it was fit.

You need the sulfur in animal manure and its residue for alliums to have any guts. Available sulfur is what makes alliums smell and taste like alliums.

Back in the 70's while working for my union I was given a tour of a smaller city's sewer treatment plant, essentially a composter process in some ways a lot like Milwaukee's. Very interesting. The sewer workers often grew their tomatoes in the dried end product which was very similar to Milorganite. Heavy metals were a concern then too; so they weren't really supposed to do that, but the tomatoes grew like crazy. That process also produces methane. Originally that city had hoped to capture that and run the city vehicles on it, but too much paper and other oddities got flushed down the stools so the methane wasn't clean enough. They simply burned it off, unfortunately.

Another gorgeous day today - I spent a few hours pulling back mulch, raking, picking up sticks and generally enjoying nature. In addition to the garlic bed pictured below, I found a single hyacinth bulb that has sprouted. Can't wait until my crocuses and tulips come up!

Looks like you have some nice healthy sprouts there in NY!

I gave my garlic beds a shot of urea dissolved in water yesterday. It looks like I have about a 95% stand from the 221 cloves planted last fall which I am happy with. I might have a couple casualties from a %&$! squirrel digging for a nut in one of the beds. The plants are too big to protect them with fencing so it is what it is.

I counted yesterday about 80 plants up of the 125? or so I planted. I hope the rest come up. I do remember very heavy rains after planting, I am not so sure I will see any make a late appearance.

We had a hard freeze last night, about 20F and now it will be creeping up to 70 by wednesday then down to 20F again. I hope everything sprouting will be ok, all the hardy stuff is coming up, daffodils, tulips, poppies, alliums, tiger lilies..

That's a beautiful start, biondanonima.

Peter - I hope more of the garlic comes up. Is it your Music from last year's harvest or the Russian Red that you got from Big Red Barn that didn't show? Or some of each?

My garlic got pummeled by hail last night. We had enough to completely cover the ground with the largest that I saw bigger than a quarter. I shined my car headlights on my garlic this morning and it was still upright but looked like it had some leaf damage. It should rebound OK I think.

IIRC, it was the Music, mostly in one bed that had poor germination where I grew it last year. I will go and take a more careful counting this weekend.

Here are my garlic beds as of March 28th. They are doing well so far in spite of getting some leaf damage from 2 hail storms in early March.

I haven't counted but I think around 200 of the 221 cloves planted are now growing which is a little over 90%. They should really take off now that the temperatures are warming up and we have broken out of our drought. I fertilized them with urea last week and will again in another week or 2.

First pic is of about 60 German White and the second picture has 2 beds with about 140 plants of the 9 different varieties I listed in the OP.

Garden pictures · More Info

Garden pictures · More Info

LoneJack, what is your mulch I am seeing on the top of the beds, leaves/woodchips? Do you pull it off? If so, pull it off in spring, summer, before harvest when promoting drying? Thanks for the info.

Nice screen name!!!

The mulch is mostly shredded fall leaves and a little bit of grass clippings mixed in. I add about 4" in the fall after the ground starts to freeze up. In the spring after the garlic starts to grow a bit and the weather has moderated, I pull off about 1/2 of it and loosen the remaining mulch to liberate any plants that might be having trouble penetrating the mulch. I leave the rest on to suppress weeds but if it is a abnormally wet spring I might pull more off in May or so to protect against neck rot.

Thank you. I used leaf mulch this year and my beds look exactly like yours. I was wondering about pulling back some of the mulch as the spring rains start up. Thanks again!

Here is my garlic beds. I do not have that nice a raised beds and I still have problems with garlic rots in summer. Maybe another year of experimenting.

First two rows are some unknown garlic, mostly German red. 3rd row and 4th row are softneck garlic, the 2nd year. The 5th row is German White. The 6th and 7th rows are Music. The softneck and Music are doing well.

Continue, the middle rows are the Music.