Growing garlic

[jJim McLaughlin]

Portland Oregon area

Suddenly have an urge to grow garlic.

Soil is well drained and loamy, has 3/4 day sun.

Plant from sets?

What time of year?

Thanks.

[Travis M.]

Plant sets in the fall.

[jJim McLaughlin]

Thank you.

Add sulphur to the soil?

Its already pretty acid due to the centuries of fri**ing Douglas fir needle fall.

Should have figured the sets in the fall. Its a bulb after all.

I've had real good luck with shallots in the same general garden area so I think I ought to try the garlic, too.

Shallots and garlic are reasonably small and I use them in cooking, bu not in huge quanities.

Onions wouldn't work. They take too much room and I use too many. I wouldnt be able to grow enough volume. The soil is too clayish, despite years of compost and sand amendment. And I don't want to only do onions.

[Alex]

|>> Portland Oregon area |>> Suddenly have an urge to grow garlic. |> Plant sets in the fall.

If you miss the fall opportunity, early spring is OK although the bulbs will be a bit smaller come harvest.

Alexander Miller, Vancouver Island; Zone 7-8ish? Soggy winters, baked dry summers. Shallow topsoil, blue clay beneath. Using mostly raised beds :)

[Dwayne]

I would either order the garlic I wanted or buy some from the grocery store. Break the cloves apart and separate them by size. Use the small ones and plant the larger.

Find a bed that you will be able to keep up for years. Plant the cloves 4 inches apart with the pointed end up, in a row deep enough so you will have

1/2 inch of dirt on top. They grow in almost any soil. I raised it in Arkansas (Acidic soil) and here now in Kansas (neutral soil). I prefer the elephant garlic over the strong ones. I add fertilizer to the soil between my harvest and the replanting of the next years crop. I use 10-10-10, and do it sparingly. I like to water the crop every 5 or so days when we don't get any rain.

I harvest mine when the tops start dying back (end of June to first of August, depending upon the year), cure them (wash the dirt off, cut all but

6 to 8 inches of stem off, and lay them on the floor of my garage for 10 to 15 days), and then put them in the coolest room of the basement until September. Then I take out a bunch of the largest, separate the cloves, plant 100 of the biggest cloves and use or give away the smaller. It last in my basement until well into the next summer if I don't use it or give it away.

Dwayne

[Paul E. Lehmann]

If you do not harvest them, will they come up again next spring?

[Phisherman]

That's good. Give em some rotted cow manure, fish emulsion, organic matter if you want strong plants.

That will work. I took apart a corm and planted each toe.

Not sure. Mine continue to come up Jan-June year after year then die back in the summer heat (e.TN). In Ohio they grew more prolific, liking a cooler climate. Yours should do well in a cool sunny location.

[Jan Flora]

Look up Filaree Farms online. They sell all sorts of yummy garlic and offer cultivation advice. They're a great company. I'm a happy customer : )

Jan in Alaska

[John Bachman]

You cannot tell what climate the grocery store garlics were raised in, very likely it was China as most garlic comes from there these days.

There are plenty of reputable suppliers of various varieties of garlic on line. Google garlic and pick whichever one fits your fancy.

John

[John Bachman]

Yes but you will not be happy with the result. Each clove produces a new plant which develops a head full of cloves. So if you leave a head in the ground with 10 cloves in you will get 10 plants which will each try to produce a new head. The proxomity of all these plants to one another will prevent the development of any useable garlic.

Dig 'em.

John

[Travis M.]

You forgot the sig delimiter. hyphen hyphen space enter.

[William Wagner]

Here are bunch of garlics to peruse.

are located in Oregon, USA.

Bill

[Dwayne]

Yes. If you plant them now they will come up but probably not develop into cloves by harvest time. My Elephant garlic wont. It turns out to be one big ball. The second summer they will split. If you wait until Sept to plant the cloves, rather than now, they will be ready by next summer. If you don't harvest all of them, the cloves will on the ones left in the ground will make grow into more balls and split into cloves. The man who gave me some of his garlic has a 30 ft row. He harvests and cures what he needs and leaves the rest in the ground.

Dwayne

[Alex]

|You forgot the sig delimiter. |hyphen hyphen space enter.

Actually no, I didn't.

But when posting a follow-up I try to remember to delete whatever quoted thread seems irrelevant, and leave only enough - in my judgement of course - to set or clarify the context for my response. And of course, while highliting the parts to delete, it's no problem to include any part of a signature I'd rather not quote.

There are several good reasons to do this, including global bandwidth economy as well as courtesy to - among others - those who may be stuck with slow & expensive dial-up connections.

But I'm sure you know all this. Possibly you, yourself, sometimes forget. If so would you like to be reminded? Maybe meantime you could post follow-ups to all the other folks here who don't know (or forget) about this.

Now this is a gardening forum, So can you contribute something about garlic to the garlic thread?

Or what do you know about, say, symphylans?

"Fom things that go bump in the night And the signature police Dear Lord, Protect Us."

[John McWilliams]

Adding a sig delimiter is a courtesy to any and all who may reply, often as important as editing or trimming replies.

[Alex]

|Adding a sig delimiter is a courtesy to any and all who may reply, often |as important as editing or trimming replies.

Aw, Baloney

Quotation of unneccesary/irrelevant material, often from several receding levels of thread - which seems to be the norm here - are far more important and intrusive. Trimming them, as one "ought" to, automatically solves the "problem" (what problem?) of re-quoting a few lines of (potentially) irrelevant signature.

But I don't usually like to spend - and I don't intend to spend any more - time whining about that.

Tell you what - any info that I might put in my signature, I will put instead in the body of the message.

But only if I feel it makes sense.

Now I'm done with this nonsense. It's a GARDENING forum. Alexander

[FragileWarrior]

"Dwayne" wrote in news:6b580$46351a0d$c644ecf1$ [e-mail]:

That's sort of interesting. Is it usable when it's one big ball? I've never gotten around to planting garlic and I curse myself every spring for forgetting.

[John McWilliams]

Uh, I did say "often as", but I agree that poor trimming is a bigger problem in many usenet groups.

[Alex]

Nice buns, John. (ambiguous smile) Alexander

[Rudy Canoza]

I don't think growing garlic is all that rewarding. I grew some once, and I have to say I got some satisfaction from it, but we use so much of it, and the stuff doesn't keep all that well if you grow a lot of it, and the stuff also is so cheap to buy, that it just doesn't seem worth it. I think a better use of the time and space and other resources is to grow fresh herbs, which are /not/ cheap, and which /do/ "store" well, if by storage you take to mean keeping them on the plant until you trim a little for use.

Especially having limited gardening space, I only want to grow those things where there's both a marked quality improvement by growing my own, and a significant price saving. Garlic isn't one. I wouldn't grow my own dried beans, either, for the same reason.