Got mine done last week while it was still dry for a bit. I had already done my manure and meals weeks go so the bed was pretty much ready to plant. Got it buried under pine straw. 365 cloves, some of it homegrown, and also trying a lot of new kinds from Keene this year. So I have a few good rows, and a lot of little squares of stuff.

Got mine in on Saturday and covered with leaf mulch. Zone 4B and a week late from my preferred planting date but they'll grow roots before the ground freezes. I fertilized and tilled in the leaves I used last year for cover mulch. I went a little excessive planting 450 big cloves this year but doesn't take much longer than 200 so what the heck.

Was wondering if anyone was still here to start a garlic thread...

I just broke open all of the cloves for this year, and after final bed prep, they will all be planted tomorrow. After losing my whole collection 3 times, my days of big plantings are done... only 155 cloves this year, of my 9 favorite varieties.

So having set aside the planting stock, most of the remaining garlic from the 2020/2021 season will be peeled & dehydrated.

What varieties are you growing @zeedman Zone 5 Wisconsin?

Still growing the same varieties as last year:

• Carpati
• Dubna Standard
• Estonian Red
• Georgian Fire
• German White
• Krasnodar Red
• Ron's Single Center
• Special Idaho
• Vic's

20 cloves each for Estonian Red, Georgian Fire, Ron's, and Special Idaho; 15 each of the rest. I may make a couple substitutions next year, but for the most part am happy with these.

What types/varieties is everyone else growing?

Got my beds prepped with bone meal and planning to plant tomorrow - will add some blood meal as I go. I have four beds that each get 49 cloves in a 7x7 grid. Montana Zemo, Polish, Kyjev and Music. I phased out German Giant and Russian Red due to poor performance and Music will be the next one to go if it doesn't do well this year. Fingers crossed better prep and shallower planting (finger depth instead of 6") will give me better results next spring!

Had a gorgeous day for planting today. One bed each Polish and Kyjev, 1.5 beds Montana and a few rows of Music. Finger depth planting was about a million times faster and easier than digging down six inches! I'll mulch the beds with shredded leaves when they finally drop from the trees. The rest of last year's harvest is slated for general cooking over the next few weeks or dehydrating as I type.

I weeded and fertilized my garlic yesterday with urea. About 1/2 cup urea dissolved in 5 gallons of water over a 4'x10' bed. So far there are a dozen or so out of 114 that are no shows but I expect some of them will come up soon as there are some others that are just breaking ground. The overachievers are 4-5" tall.

Garlic bed is looking good :) It's the last spot to get the snow melted off, so it's been under white insulation till recently.

Some have popped up by a couple few inches and got cold nipped- will recover. Others are just starting to peep out of the pine straw. I'd have to look at the map for varieties, but almost all are popping up. I can clearly tell my mother square because it's throwing up clusters of greens.

No weeding needied in that whole section. In a few weeks the onion section should still be good for planting in spring onions. I'm trying a couple perennial/carryover kinds this year.

Got the final cleanup of the old stable done last month on a couple nice days. I've got a second load (and last) of old dry manure scraped up and piled up for dressings. And thank my ankles, the dirt floor re-leveled and stable mats back flat again. I've got a small load of manure straw from the cleanup I'll top dress the garlic bed and onion area soon.

My garlic is currently tucked under 6" of snow. Probably good because it's supposed to get down the 5F tonight. The snow should melt off by early next week and then looks like it will have some great growing weather through the end of the month with highs in the 50s and 60s.

Mine are all peeping up through the inch or so of leaf mulch I have left at this point. Planning to give them their first dose of spring fertilizer this week, when we should finally have consistent temps in the 50s during the day.

right now it's 4 degrees outside but a warm up starts tomorrow so It will be weeks before I see my garlic grow. (Minnesota zone 4) Still have plenty from last year holding up great and may do jars of spicy pickled garlic.

This from the US. Foods Farmer's report March 8th 2022.

GARLIC

There are lighter supplies out of California, but garlic suppliers are holding to normal order sizes this week for peeled garlic. Suppliers expect that they will need to rely on foreign supply, and will therefore need to fill orders with their packer label between now and the new crop in the summer.

Chinese Garlic!

"China is one of the biggest exporters of garlic: it is estimated that around 80% of the garlic sold around the world is from China. A considerable amount of the garlic produced in China is toxic:"

NEVER!!

That's why I will never buy grocery store garlic.

Spicy pickled garlic? Tell me more! ;-)

I'd be happy to tell you more zeedman. I haven't pickled strictly garlic but did a dozen jars of Asparagus with various degrees of spices and heat which all had a 1/2 dozen cloves of whole garlic in each jar. I didn't care for the Asparagus in any combination but the garlic cloves were incredibly good and I ended up just eating the garlic. The best came from the jars with heavy dill and crushed red peppers so I'm going in that direction.

Since the Asparagus failure I've wanted to pickle garlic but had limited harvests. I have enough from last year to do a test run and experiment now with different spices and heat levels, and I increased my garlic planting so I can do more of the winning combination in the fall. I'm going to use a basic ball recipe which consists of 75% vinegar for a brine but I will also substitute a percentage of the vinegar with an equal amount of lemon and lime juice at different levels to reduce the strong vinegar bite.

I've used 100% bottled lime and lemon juice as a substitute in my salsa and is totally acceptable by the USDA because they're slightly more acidic than 5% vinegar. With 50% vinegar, 25% lemon and 25% Lime juice I get a very good salsa, so I'll experiment with different levels in the garlic with no sugar. I just don't like adding sugar to reduce the bite of vinegar because it just makes things taste weird to me.

Heh kevin, that's how I started pickling garlic. The cloves I put into other pickled stuff was always so good I started doing garlic on it's own.

That is pretty much how I enjoy pickled garlic now; the 2-3 cloves in the bottom of the pickle jar. They stay incredibly crunchy & delicious, better IMO than the pickles they're packed with. Putting more cloves in with the pickles would probably overpower the other flavors though, especially if they are big cloves.

I went out and sprinkled about 1 cup or granular urea on my garlic bed yesterday before we got about an inch of rain overnight which should have dissolved it into the soil. I think I only have about 100 out of 114 planted that will produce. A few more came up but stalled out and probably won't do anything IME. The plants that are up look good and healthy and are growing well. I also puled a few weeds out of the bed and my asparagus beds.

Does anyone add other nutrients to their garlic besides just nitrogen?

Just compost and/or manure, turned under before planting. I know many people top-dress their garlic, but my results have been good enough that I've never felt the need. Because I mulch with green-cut hay, that may be releasing some nutrients as it breaks down.

I too add compost in the fall before planting but no fertilizer. I haven't mulched in the fall for the last 3 years and the garlic seems to do better with less rot. In the late winter and spring I only use urea 3 or 4 times from February to early May. I try to lightly mulch it some time in early April with the first cutting of grass clippings to keep the weeds down.

I had to go pick up some cattle feed at the local farm coop yesterday and asked what they were getting for Urea and they said $31 for a 50 lb. bag. The bag I bought there in 2020 was $15.

I add Harmony (5-4-3 organic dehydrated chicken manure) at a rate of 4.5 lbs per 100 square feet (100 lbs elemental N/acre) when tilling the bed right before planting in early November. Thereafter, I add blood meal in mid March, and late April at a rate of 1.5 pounds per 100 square feet (75 lbs elemental N/acre). I sprinkle the blood meal on top of the thick grass clipping mulch right before a good rain and let it wash down to the soil surface. The mulch also largely breaks down during the growing season and provides some nutrients. My bulbs average 2.5" so it is working well.

My bed was originally mostly composted horse manure a few years back before I went all garlic in it. Last year was an autumn refresh of bone meal, blood meal, and dry old composted manure- all that got worked in and rained in before I planted cloves. Then a good layer of pine straw on top- I've sometimes used regular straw in the past.

I use a lot of leaf mold tea in the spring, and compost tea, and ferments like comfrey and kitchen garden weeds later on in the season in my waterings, depends on what's ready to use. So when the garlic needs watering, it will usually get some of whatever I'm mixing into the watering can.

Kitchen garden weeds for me is usually getting the overabundance of things like tarragon or carrot tops, dandelions and plantains. Not crummy seedy weeds.

Right now I got a batch of leaf mold tea from a bag I set up last fall. I don't think I need to use it on the garlic. It's coming up really well and we are getting a nice amount of precipitation. And I did just refresh last fall. By the time I think it needs watering/feeding, I will likely have a different bucket of something ready to go.

We have had an unusually warm March and my garlic is loving it - I've got at least 3" of growth in all four beds, even the one that gets a little less sun. I didn't get around to fertilizing yet, but it's going to rain for the next three or four days, so I'll probably go out tonight and give each bed a half an ounce of urea.

Did a head count today. All 365 accounted for- plus a few more. I guess I didn't do as good of a job cleaning up the mother spot and a few were popping up in the path area. It looks like everything is there, but I didn't break out the map to confirm.

Everything is looking good. The ones that popped up a bit early and got nipped have bounced back 3-4 inches across the board of good green.

We have been having extra chilly weather for a few days- got snow for April Fools. And really damp besides. So I haven't done anything about feeding. In a week or so the weather is perking back up to the spring where it should be and maybe I'll feed a little then.

Hit my garlic with its second dose of fertilizer today - plants are looking good, though I'm seeing a bit more yellow in the leaves than I would like. It's been pretty wet so I'm wondering if they aren't getting a little too much water. Anyway, out of 196 plants it looks like I have around 190 sprouts, which makes me happy!

It started raining two days ago and remembered I had to fertilize my garlic. Mixed up some Urea and ammonium sulfate for the first dose and when I got to the garlic patch I noticed Most of them were up. It was raining so didn't feel like counting them but at least I fertilized them but did notice a lot were yellow. I believe mine at least was because they just poked out of the ground through the leaf mulch and the day was completely cloud so are just in need of some sun light.

My garlic is up. As usual, a few shoots were bogged down under the mulch, so pulled the hay aside to free them. The ground was muddy from the rain, so I had to tiptoe on the edge of the box to work. Looks like very good emergence thus far, only 2-3% no-shows.

I should start seeing scapes towards the end of May.

My onions are doing very well so far. I planted a couple new to me red onions this year since my local place had run out of Red Candy when I stopped in to buy my Dixondale starts. Red Candy underperformed in size the last few years anyway.

This is the first year in a decade or so I didn't plant any leeks. Downsizing a bit because we are spending most weekends at the lake cabin.

Zinc (Zn), Copper (Cu), Boron (B) and Molybdenum (Mo)! I read a study on garlic conducted in India on the effects using different rates of these 4 micro nutrients, and after testing about 50 combinations they concluded the best combination increased bulb size by 25% or more! It wasn't a wack job blog or U tube channel but an actual controlled scientific study. After doing the math the amounts are Zn-2.8 grams, Cu-1 gram, B-2.8 grams and Mo-1 gram per 100 square feet.

So I'm going to do my own study and apply the micro's to one 25' row of hard necks and one row of soft necks and compare them to the untreated rows at harvest. Note the amounts, so a 25' row would amount to a 1/4 gram of Boron and 3/4 gram's of Zinc and would do no harm, so have nothing to lose.

That sounds rather interesting kevin, let us know how that goes.

Here it was wet and chill enough for a while that I hadn't done anything in the garlic bed. Then at the beginning of the week we got full on dry and hot summer weather. All week was mowing down mulch patches, cleaning up and setting in other beds. Really glad I had mulched the garlic deep again- weeding was easy and quick. Got my onion sets, shallot sets, two kind of onion starts, and ramp starts in. I'm tinkering with growing out some perpetual onions and building patches of ramps out back. But still wanted some storage onions and shallots this fall.

And moved the half dozen leek tails from the spring containers out to a spot too. I'm not sure if using tails will trick them into flowering this year so I can get seed.. or if I will have to wait till next year. I've not tried getting tails to seed before.

We are supposed to be getting some rain in again tonight. With a fresh watering, I'll go ahead and get some tea fertilized in over the next couple days.

I'm trying something different with the border of the bed this year. About a 8 inch strip between where the garlic ends and the board edging the bed is. I usually plant in marigolds and pull them when I pull the garlic- I tend to repot the marigolds for color into the fall. This year I'm doing small plantings of a few kinds of cress, kale, chinese cabbage, mizuna, and successions of multisown beets.

I got busy last week and missed my target date for my garlic's last shot of urea. I think I'm just going to skip it and see what happens. Scapes usually start in early June here, but I've already got quite a few leaves browning out so it seems like things are happening a bit faster than usual this season.

I have scapes forming on about half of my plants now. I'm going to cut some off on Thursday to take to the lake cabin this weekend and add to a grilled veggie medley. I should have some 6" heads of broccoli and some small red salad onions to harvest as well.

Checked over my garlic today and things are not looking great. Over the last couple of weeks, at least half of my plants failed - no idea why. Could drainage be the problem? They are planted in raised corrugated steel beds, and the plants closest to the edges seem to have the highest failure rate. Is the metal preventing drainage, or perhaps too much heat? So frustrating!

What kind of fail, cripsing up, rotting out, got something moldy or black in the bulbs when you check them?

A lot of people are using those steel beds now, and I would think if edge heat was a problem we would be seeing folks complaining about it. So maybe not edge heat.

Have you been getting a lot of rain? Too wet can make garlic poop. Too dry can do it too and the edge of a raised bed or container can dry out first. If your bed mix is good I would think your drainaige is fine- if your bed mix does not drain well you should amend it.

Garlic can get some icks that will poop them out right fast- Iost a raised bed a few years back like that. The bed went down over a couple weeks and when I broke open a head it had the smut in it. Brown stuff, can't remember what it's called.

Crisping up, for the most part. Here are photos of the root ends of what I pulled today.

Some clearly never developed roots, while others just rotted at the neck. I noticed a few weeks ago that some bottom leaves were browning prematurely, but it didn't seem too serious, until suddenly the plants just completely wilted and died. The weather was not especially dry or wet that I recall - none of my other plants needed any special attention or watering, but I admit I wasn't paying close attention to the garlic.

Such a bummer - I had about 180 healthy plants last month and now I've got maybe 25, and even those don't look great. Time for a soil test?

Awww, that is indeed sad. Might be time for a soil test... might be time to stop using that bed for garlic. Rotate something else in there for a year or few if you can.

Bummer indeed. You may want to look up onion and garlic white rot, i think it may be what you have.

Garlic harvest is in! Got a nice full harvest in, got it all curing on racks in the screened porch right now. I can really tell I amended the bed last year. Right now I got the area cleaned out, the pine straw pulled back to the path, and a fresh grass mulch laid down. We got rain in the forecast through the weekend so I'm watering in the patch with some ferment in the morning to let it get well watered in before I put in the short crops sometime next week.

Only one of my varieties ready so far (Carpati, artichoke type). It is an odd one, because the tops fall over like onions when ready to dig. The rest of the varieties should be ready to dig next week. Carpati looks good, but a little smaller than last year; I anticipate the others will be a little smaller as well. Due to recent hardship, the garlic site has been neglected other than having weeded twice.

Dug the last of the garlic yesterday, and hung it to dry today. As expected, no real monsters this year... but all were still decently sized. Porcelain, Rocambole, Marbled Purple Stripe (all hard neck) and Artichoke (soft neck) varieties.

2022 garlic harvest (minus Georgian Fire, not pictured)

Since I intend to maintain 2 varieties of each sub-type, I will most likely eliminate one of the three MPS sub-types, to make room for an Asiatic sub-type for 2023.

Harvested my garlic here in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia between June 20th and July 9th, digging them as they reached five top leaves that were mostly green. I then pull down the fifth leaf to give nice clean bulbs. After growing dozens of varieties over the years I settled on Music, Russian Red, and Estonian Red. The vast majority are 2.5" to 3.0" with the largest reaching 3.3" (Music).

The tables are to block sun and rain during curing on the covered porch.

Both impressive harvests! I think my LARGEST bulbs this year were 2.5". lol

I cleaned up my garlic and onion harvest this weekend after letting them hang in the basement for a month. I store them in my tornado shelter room off the basement under my front porch where it stays in the low 60s year round.