DOWN TO EARTH WITH GARLIC
How to Plant, Feed, Harvest, and Store Your Amazing Bulbs
Planting garlic when the moon is below the horizon and gathering it when it is in conjunction prevents it from having an objectionable smell.
PLINY THE ELDER
Despite my vows and my desire for fresh, juicy garlic, I didn’t try to grow my own. I was more involved with flowers than with vegetables, but deep down I was also intimidated by the idea of growing garlic. I knew nothing about it, and neither did my friends. I didn’t want to ask Anna (the language problem), and I felt awkward about asking Aldo’s dad. Then more white bulbs of garlic started appearing on grocery store shelves, and the urgency to grow it passed. My flower gardens expanded, and I had no space for garlic anyway.
But one day many years later, after Joe and I had parted and I had a new husband and a new house with flowers filling the front and back yards, my friend Judith came knocking on my door with a basket of huge, healthy cloves of garlic.
“You can plant what’s in this basket or you can eat it,” she said in her forthright way. “But since you have such a big garden now, I think it’s time you grew it.”
“But I don’t know how to grow garlic. And where will I plant all these?” I moaned, pointing to the dozens of pristine white cloves. They were fat little crescents like the sections of a mandarin orange, fairly bursting with energy, and I could feel them calling to me. What I really wanted to do was eat them. But Judith had thrown down the gauntlet. It was time for me—garlic lover, gardener, cook—to grow the stuff.
“Okay, you can eat half of them,” Judith conceded, taking a closer look at all the cottagey flowers jammed together in my garden. My philosophy is that planting close keeps the weeds out—or at least out of sight under the tightly spaced perennials—but Judith is a landscape designer and she knows an overplanted garden when she sees one. A little cloud passed over her face. “It’s going to be hard to find space for even half a dozen cloves here,” she said. “But we’re going to make this work even if these aren’t optimum conditions. Garlic is so tough they’ll likely come up like gangbusters next year.”
Judith is a positive person. I knew she was rethinking her decision to give me the garlic left over from her fall planting—a robust variety called ‘Fish Lake #3,’ which she’d ordered from Ted Maczka, an eccentric octogenarian grower in Ontario known as the Fish Lake Garlic Man (he’d sent the garlic to her in several waxed milk cartons)—but with her let’s-deal-with-it attitude, she surveyed my garden and found its good points. “You’ve got lots of sun here, which is good—they like sun—and though your soil is pretty sandy, you’ve added lots of compost and it’s looking okay. Garlic isn’t choosy, but it does prefer something a bit richer and loamier.”
Her eagle eye found about a dozen spots with praaw-ba-bly enough space to allow the cloves to grow into bulbs. She waved her hand toward the spots, which weren’t much wider than the coffee mug I was holding, between low-growing perennials like thyme and Carpathian bellflower (Campanula carpatica).
“These garlic guys have skinny leaves, and they need all the sun they can get,” Judith said. “They need as little competition as possible, please.” She raised her eyebrow. “Might you consider... aah, thinning out a couple of plants to make more room? Some of them are real spreaders.”
I’d already thought of that and was ready to make a little space for my new visitors, especially if it meant lovely garlic to eat next year. Visions of Anna’s and Aldo’s dad’s luscious garlic had started to dance in my head.
But on second thought, I couldn’t dig up huge swaths of plants from my new front-yard garden to create optimum conditions for garlic, and in its present state my garden certainly didn’t offer such conditions, as Judith had made clear. Still, she was right—it was time I grew some garlic. I’d been cooking with it for decades with little understanding of where it came from or how it was cultivated, even though I grew a few other vegetables, like tomatoes and beans and lettuces and herbs. I started them from seed in my basement and grew them in big pots on my driveway and my front steps, as well as in corners of my garden. I’d found places for them, hadn’t I? I was also unhappy with the garlic generally sold in supermarkets—those small dried-up bulbs from China—and used garlic powder as a last resort.
Judith grew garlic successfully in her small city garden, so why couldn’t I?
I BIT the bullet and pulled out a few filler annuals that weren’t going to live much longer anyway, since it was late October. I also dug out some self-seeded lady’s mantle and rampant gaura. I plunged a sharp trowel into the soil and excavated little holes for the garlic cloves. (“Pointed end up, please,” Judith sang out. “Otherwise you’ll have bent stems next year—I mean the garlic will...” She laughed.) It was worth getting rid of a few overgrown plants to try something new. Anyway, my garden needed a different look, which a few garlic plants might provide. And sometimes the best things you do are unplanned, even thrust upon you by others. Goodness knows I loved garlic’s cousins, the ornamental alliums, which I grew in clumps and as single exclamation points among the flowers. And wow, if this experiment worked...
I have had a whole field of garlic planted... so that when you come we may be able to have many of your favorite dishes.
In a letter from BEATRICE D’ESTE, the Duchess of Milan, to her sister Isabella, the Marchioness of Mantua, 1491
JUDITH AND I managed to squeeze in about two dozen cloves that day. (I ate the rest, but not that day and not all in one day. They were delicious.) After we finished planting we sat on the steps and celebrated with a glass of wine while Judith assured me that garlic was actually one of the easiest of plants to grow as long as you met most of its needs—which is true of all plants, when it comes down to it.
“In many ways garlic is like a tulip,” she said. “You plant it in fall and it grows some roots and then lies underground for a cool sleep and wakes up when spring comes. The only difference is you don’t dig up the tulips and eat them—well, there are more differences than that, but the principle is the same.” She went on with more tips about growing, harvesting, and storing garlic. It sounded simple, and as we sipped and looked at the setting sun, I grew more and more confident that I’d have a lovely crop of garlic just like Judith’s next summer. But Judith was thinking about what I needed to do to harvest at least some garlic.
“If you want to fertilize them, they like a little nitrogen,” she said, going over a mental checklist. “I use blood meal mixed with the soil when I plant them.” She advised me to dig them up when half the leaves had yellowed, and to make sure I stored them in a cool place.
“I guess I should keep what we don’t eat right away in the fridge,” I offered.
“Heavens no!” said Judith, looking horrified. “Put them in the fridge and they’ll think it’s winter again and start the growing process all over. They’ll sprout! Keep them cool, not cold.”
I figured I’d worry about that next year. “Now, what else?” Judith pondered. I topped up her glass. “Mmmm, yes—here’s something important. In about mid-June you should cut off the scapes—the tall flower stems—so that the energy goes into bulb production. But damn, I love those scapes—they’re the coolest things since TV. They’re so entertaining as they weave around, curling and then straightening like magic. So I leave them on, and I don’t find it affects my bulbs that much.”
She turned to me with a wry grin. “Well, all this is according to me,” she said and then drained her glass. “For the expert stuff, you might want to read up on raising garlic. Right now it’s time for me to go.”
“One more thing,” she said as she backed out of the driveway. “Don’t forget to lay on a mulch of some chopped leaves once the ground has frozen. You want to keep those little cloves warm and safe.”
At that moment, even though my garlic cloves were safely tucked into their beds, I felt a twinge of nervous anticipation. I was a garlic virgin, left to nurture Judith’s gifts on my own and unsure of how to go about it but filled with excitement about what was to come.
Oh, that miracle clove! Not only does garlic taste good, it cures baldness and tennis elbow, too.
LAURIE BURROWS GRAD, food writer
OVER THE winter I completely forgot about those little cloves snuggled under the ground. I’m sure they didn’t care. After all, they had a strong heritage of survival behind them, and they didn’t need support from me.
My memory wasn’t even jogged by the sight of garlic shoots peeking through the ground in spring. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, like too many gardeners who live to regret their laziness, I hadn’t taken the time to mark the spots where Judith and I had planted the garlic the previous October. Second, I mistook the garlic shoots for the drumstick allium (A. sphaerocephalon) bulbs I’d planted weeks before we put in the garlic (which also weren’t labeled, I might add). If I’d known what garlic looks like when it pokes its nose out of the ground, I would have recognized this as a bad sign. A. sphaerocephalon is a skinny ornamental with flowers like purple eggs at the end of long, wiry stems—dainty stems not at all like garlic’s more robust ones. I like them planted singly or in threes as accent points throughout the garden, and I’d put in a couple of dozen. It was a few weeks before it dawned on me there were too many of them showing in my garden.
Could some of these be the garlic Judith and I planted? Is this what garlic looks like?
I phoned Judith right away. “This doesn’t sound right,” she said. “The shoots should be thicker, sort of stubby looking, but they could be small because they’re so crowded. Never mind—give them some more room if you can, keep the ground weeded around them, give them a jolt of fertilizer, and you should harvest some small bulbs this summer.”
Judith, ever the optimist. My confidence faded—this wasn’t the gangbusters crop she had predicted. I didn’t even know which plants were garlic and which were ornamental alliums. Then I came across a single fat garlic shoot I’d overlooked in an out-of-the-way space by a pathway. He was a beautiful boy—for how could I think of him as anything other than a boy, with his thick stem thrusting so strongly out of the ground? He grew vigorously, with a rounded fleshy top of grassy green over a vertically veined base, and within a few days he was taller. Once he reached thumb height, his fleshy top grew into a stem that lengthened and leafed out in even spaces, sending flat blades to float out laterally from perfectly incised cuts on the stem. Now this was garlic! Each leaf was placed exactly halfway around the stem from the one below it. My boy was a marvel of balanced design.
Like many beautiful boys, however, his appearance was deceiving. I’d done my homework and had read up on garlic, as Judith suggested, and I knew that this stem was not a stem at all but a tube or sheath of leaves that originated from the real stem underground, which doesn’t look like any stem I’ve ever seen. It’s a flat plate, called the stem plate, from which thin white roots grow downward as it pushes the leaf sheath upward. The garlic cloves—each of which contains all the elements needed to grow a whole new plant the next year, assuming we don’t eat them—develop in a cluster around the leaf sheath on top of the stem plate, creating the bulb. When the bulb has been harvested and cured, the stem plate becomes the hard, scarred surface from which you snap off the cloves to use for dinner. I’d seen hundreds of garlic bulbs in my kitchen, and I never knew that hard base was actually the stem!
It was the leaves pushing up through the center of the sheath that accounted for my boy’s quick growth—the second leaf emerged hastily from inside the first one, then the third from inside the second, like chorus girls popping out of a cake, rising higher and higher. As Judith had said, the leaves are important, even precious. Because there are so few—sometimes fewer than a dozen—losing just one leaf can reduce the size of the bulb by as much as 13 percent. A plant can lose leaves by amputation or by shade—hence the need to grow garlic with space around it and to weed assiduously.
My beautiful boy grew to a young man, and I checked him carefully every few days, weeding around him and cutting away potentially interfering perennials. I watched his siblings, too—no favoritism here, even though I was banking on my young man to make me a successful garlic grower, even if it was only of one plant. I did as much as I could for the others when I could find them in my crowded garden, digging out the plants around them, making sure they had enough water. Unfortunately, my garden had not been the right place for them from the beginning, and it was a losing battle. They remained skinny Minnies, though they all grew scapes because they were from the hardneck family of garlics. As already mentioned, garlic comes in two types—hardneck (Allium sativum var. ophioscorodon), which is closer to the ancient type and grows a scape that curls as it matures, and softneck (Allium sativum var. sativum). Hardneck types produce a single row of six to eleven cloves, which cluster around its underground base. Softneck garlic, on the other hand, grows with no theatrics—and by that I mean no graceful, curling flower scapes. It is a shorter plant, and its bulb produces several rows of cloves, larger ones in an outer row and smaller ones inside them, closer to the leaf sheath, sometimes as many as twenty-four. Softneck garlic is the choice of large-scale commercial growers because it grows well in California and other warmer climates, which produce large quantities for sale and export; growers don’t need to remove the scapes, which would add to production costs; and softneck garlic usually can be stored longer than hardneck varieties. Softneck garlic is the one used for braiding because the stalk is pliable enough to manipulate.
Garlic completely conquers lassitude, catarrh, rheumatism of the arms and back, and epilepsy.
THE BOWER MANUSCRIPT
BUT MAN, Judith was right. Those scapes on the hardnecks were indeed entertaining. I’d heard of the fields of sunflowers in France whose yellow faces follow the sun from morning to night, but this natural phenomenon of plant movement was happening, albeit in a different time frame, in my own front yard! Small and skinny as they were, the scapes still put on a great show, coiling gracefully downward over a week’s time, their umbels like flamingo beaks searching the sea for food, then straightening out and pointing toward the heavens. They added an offbeat presence to my garden of busty flowers, and people taking postprandial walks down our street often stopped to ask what they were. I decided to let most of the scapes grow to maturity, as Judith did, but I decapitated some when they started to straighten out, including my boy’s. This was a few years before scapes became a gourmand’s delight, so I was ignorant of their culinary value and tossed them onto the compost heap. I hoped trimming them off would allow a few struggling plants to develop nice big bulbs for me to eat.
Well, it didn’t. Harvest time came, and I carefully dug up the bulbs and found that most of them were “rounds,” garlicspeak for bulbs composed of a single clove, but bigger than the ones in a multicloved bulb. There’s nothing wrong with rounds. They taste good—you just don’t get as much garlic. Some of my bulbs had two small cloves, nowhere near the usual yield for ‘Fish Lake #3,’ which normally produces four to six. Nevertheless, I washed the rounds off carefully, dried them in the sun, and hung all ten of them from a rafter in the garage. Once they were cured they kept me in garlic for about two weeks.
Ah, but would my young man fulfill my dream? I held my breath as I approached him near the end of July; he looked older and a little droopy, with mostly dried, tan-colored leaves. I carefully put my trowel in the ground and dug him up. He was gorgeous! Not huge, but handsome—maybe the diameter of an Oreo with three fat cloves around his nearly dried leaf sheath. Best of all, he was proof I might eventually grow a successful crop of good garlic.
I trimmed his roots and hung him in a special spot in the garage as he dried and cured. Then I cut his stem off just above his neck and put him on a shelf in the kitchen where I could admire him as I cooked. His dry, taut skin looked pearly white, and his body was beautifully rounded. I admired him for many weeks, and then I could wait no longer.
I ate him.
I can’t get enough garlic!
TED WILLIAMS
I HAVE a confession to make: I didn’t plant garlic at all for the next few years.
But about four years after my disappointing first try, I watched with interest as dozens of skinny garlic plants sprang up all over our front garden. Were these the offspring of Judith’s garlic? Why had they waited so long? As far as I knew, modern garlic had lost the ability to set seed. Was a miracle occurring here, in my own garden?
No, there was a simpler explanation. It wasn’t seed; it was the bulbils, those curious tiny clove look-alikes growing among the little flowers in the umbels, doing what they’d been programmed to do. They’d blown far and wide in my garden, and although it had taken them a few growing seasons, they were producing new plants. In late July I dug most of them up to see how they were doing and discovered a crop of small but deliciously juicy rounds. I left the rest to grow the following year, when I actually harvested some bulbs—small ones, to be sure, but some had three cloves. The next year they were bigger still.
It was enough to give me garlic fever.
Our front garden was clearly not the place to grow great garlic, so I decided to transform our last scrap of grass in the back into a thyme patch, leaving enough growing room between the new thyme plants for twenty-four garlic plants. The garlic I ordered from the website of a West Coast grower was big and luscious, and I bought more at a local September garlic fair—‘Persian Star,’ ‘Rosewood,’ ‘Dan’s Russian,’ ‘Mount Currie,’ ‘Fish Lake #3,’ and others—to plant as well as to store and eat over the winter. I’ve planted two garlic crops in that space now, and they were as easy to grow and as problem free as anything I’ve ever grown. I will admit the bulbs aren’t as big as I’d like, but they’re juicy and hot and a hundred times better than the small, dried-up Chinese store-bought variety. I figure I’m still learning how to put into practice all the little tips I’ve picked up, and soon I’ll be growing garlic like what I see at the fairs, the kind that make a statement in your garlic jar.
How to Grow Garlic
Everyone from Judith to the speakers at garlic fairs and the authors of the books I’d read had assured me that growing garlic was rewardingly easy. The simple fact is that garlic is a happy, adaptable plant that grows in many places in the world and does well in temperate areas of North America, which is most of it. It has a strong life force and wants to survive. It will sometimes change its habits to suit the conditions it faces, as when centuries ago the hardnecks evolved into softnecks in the Mediterranean area and created a new kind of garlic. I love this unsung little plant!
Garlic takes nine months to reach fruition, and in almost every part of North America it’s best planted in fall, three or four weeks before hard frost, so that it has time to develop some root growth before winter comes. Then it needs a period of cold to fully develop its bulb. Hardnecks, such as the popular Rocamboles, for example, prefer frosty winters and yield poorly without a period of vernalization, but there are always exceptions. A man southwest of Abilene, Texas, reported successfully growing a couple of Purple Stripe hardnecks in his garden, one named ‘Siberian’ just to make sure we know it likes the cold. The normally scapeless softneck cultivars do best in mild winters, but some of them, such as those of the Silverskin subgroup, do fine in colder areas where—just to demonstrate their adaptable natures—they occasionally grow a scape. (For help with what varieties to plant in your part of the world, see “A Garlic Primer.”)
Nevertheless, garlic needs some cool weather to develop the bulb, and some types like it colder than others. For example, the softneck garlic grown in California has adapted to milder winters but still needs chilly January or February weather to grow full cloves; the types grown in Central Asia, however, require really harsh winters to produce them. In places like North Africa and South Asia, where winter doesn’t exist at all, multicloved bulbs simply don’t form. In those parts, garlic is grown for its leaves, which are tasty too.
AS I discovered in my garden, if garlic is left in the ground year after year, the bulbs become ever smaller but more numerous. This is because each clove grows a new plant, and the plants become so crowded that the bulbs can’t reach a good size. Plants that grow from scattered bulbils take about three years to grow large enough to produce single, smallish rounds, but sometimes leaving the scapes on and allowing garlic to reproduce through bulbils is a way to enjoy the presence of graceful scapes in the garden as well as a taste of fresh, homegrown garlic.
Selecting the Site
Garlic likes full sun. It’s not too difficult to meet this requirement, since the period from early spring into mid to late July, the general harvest time in most parts of the continent, is usually the sunniest time of the year, with the longest days. But plant in an open area with maximum sunshine and keep the area free of even small weeds, since even they can shade the slender garlic leaves.
Garlic is usually planted in rows in the vegetable garden, but because it’s such a dramatic plant with ornamental attractions I see no reason why you can’t plant it in open areas of a sunny perennial border, singly for architectural interest or in groups of one variety each. (Need I remind you to label the spots where you bury the cloves?) In our back bed I plant garlic in circular groups of one variety, with each circle about 18 inches (half a meter) away from low perennials. They’ve grown happily that way for two seasons, though I know that’s not going to last. I’ll have to dig up another part of our garden or rent an allotment garden if I want to continue to feed my garlic obsession.
One other consideration in choosing a site: like tomatoes and other plants in the Solanaceae family, garlic crops shouldn’t be planted in the same place every year. This suggestion isn’t especially practical in a small home garden, but if you can plant garlic on the other side of the vegetable plot the following year, you should be able to avoid a buildup of pathogens or pests in the soil.
Preparing the Soil
Garlic may have originated in thin, rocky soils centuries ago, but no one was demanding a lot of it back then. It was surviving, not thriving, hanging on and establishing itself as the tough little plant it’s turned out to be. These days we want it to produce fat bulbs, so we must provide it with friable soil that drains well but is rich in organic matter. A neutral to slightly acidic pH level (6 to 7.5) is perfect. If you want to test your soil, kits are usually available at garden centers or through the local agricultural office. Most soils sit between pH 5 and 9, however, so yours is not likely a problem.
If I were preparing a garlic bed a year in advance—the best way to do it—in the fall I’d dig in some grass clippings, chopped leaves, and vegetable trimmings from the kitchen, without putting them through the composting process. Mixed well with the existing soil, they’ll break down for the following fall’s planting. But if you’re a last-minute person, like me, and you decide you want to plant garlic now, incorporate a good layer of compost or well-rotted manure and mix it in to a depth of about 6 inches (15 centimeters).
Planting
Some of the garlic cloves I planted with Judith had only 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) of soil around them—no wonder they grew up to be midgets! Most garlic should be planted 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) apart; larger varieties, such as the Porcelain group, need 6 inches (15 centimeters), so you should know your variety. If you’re planting in rows, space them no less than 8 inches (20 centimeters) apart so that the rows don’t shade each other. Rows can be wider, of course, and spacing will depend on convenience, such as location of access pathways.
Don’t buy separate cloves to plant—it’s better to start with whole bulbs and separate the cloves just before planting. Separated cloves may have small cuts or loosened skins, which could make them vulnerable to viruses or bacteria. Twist the bulbs gently or pry off the cloves, being careful not to nick them or tear off their papery skin. Plant the cloves, pointed end up, in holes about 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) deep. There should be about 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil between the tops and the soil surface. “If you plant them upside down they’ll end up in China!” said Ted Maczka, the Fish Lake Garlic Man, at a garlic fair seminar, laughing at his joke until the garlic bulbs glued to his visored cap shook dangerously. “Then the Chinese will sell them all back to us.”
Ted may have retired to a seniors’ home, but he frequently returns to his garlic farm in Ontario’s Prince Edward County to play classical music to his plants. “They show up early through the snow in spring looking for the beautiful music,” he says. He talks to them, too, because they’re living things with an energy flow and they like being included in the conversation.
IF YOU live a distance north or south of the forty-ninth parallel or the Great Lakes, the rules change. Plant a little deeper the farther north you live, a little shallower if you’re in a more southern climate. In severely cold climates, cover the cloves with as much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) of soil (plus a winter blanket of mulch); in California an inch (2 centimeters) should suffice. But don’t lose too much sleep over planting depths—if you plant too deep the shoots may take longer to pop through the earth in spring, but they’ll catch up once the weather is warm.
Many garlic growers say the most successful seed cloves don’t come from the biggest bulbs; in fact large seed cloves don’t ensure a crop of big bulbs the following year. But really small cloves aren’t ideal either; they may not grow bulbs that are properly segmented. Use only the larger outer cloves of softneck varieties for seed. “Eat the biggest and the smallest,” says Ted Maczka. “Plant the middle-sized ones.”
Watering
Garlic that doesn’t get enough to drink suffers stress and may start to produce bulbs early, resulting in smaller cloves and bulbs. The bulbs may shatter at harvest, too, meaning the skins split and leave the cloves underneath vulnerable to bacteria and rotting. Split skin is okay if you have a small crop and expect to eat it within a few weeks, but the bulbs won’t store successfully; nor, as mentioned, should you use them as seed stock.
Watering requires a commonsense approach. Plants need enough for healthy growth, but they shouldn’t be sitting in puddles. An inch or two (2.5 to 5 centimeters) of water a week is ideal, applied with a soaker hose or sprinkler in the morning if there hasn’t been enough rain. Give the plants a deep watering rather than a surface sprinkling. Garlic may be shallow rooted, but the soil must be damp enough deeply enough to prevent it from drying out quickly. Sandy soil needs to be watched because it dries out fast in hot, sunny weather.
Make sure the soil is damp when you plant the cloves so that the roots can begin to grow immediately—languishing in dry soil makes them prone to disease or deterioration. When harvest time approaches, garlic needs less water so that growth will slow and the bulbs can mature. I never pray for rain after the middle of July, and in a heavy downpour I’m tempted to rush into the garden and hold an umbrella over the garlic patch to protect the plants from soggy soil that might encourage rot. There’s not much you can do about an unwelcome rainfall, but you can withhold extra irrigation via the sprinkler.
Using Fertilizer
Loamy soil high in organic matter, which holds moisture but doesn’t get waterlogged, is more important than a truckload of fertilizer. If any fertilizer is needed, it will be nitrogen, as my oracle Judith advised. Plants lacking nitrogen look poorly—during the growing season, they show weakened vigor and a general yellowing, and they produce small bulbs earlier than normal. Judith follows the general rule and mixes blood meal with the soil when she’s planting the cloves, then applies it as a side dressing a couple of times during the season.
Nitrogen encourages foliage growth and can slow bulb formation near harvest time, so hold off on fertilizer altogether as harvest approaches.
Because it’s a root crop, garlic may also benefit from a little potassium. Wood ashes are a good organic form.
Dealing with Pests and Diseases
There’s something to be said for being smelly and strong tasting—it chases away diseases and pests. For millennia garlic’s sulfurous compounds have defended it against plant-eating pests and have poisoned strains of fungi and bacteria that dared invade its skin. But garlic isn’t immune to everything, and the list of its biological enemies below may suggest that garlic isn’t all that tough. Still, most of its threats aren’t deadly and can be controlled by good garden practices, such as removing and destroying plants that look sick, avoiding too much watering and subsequent soggy soil and humid air, and planting only healthy, unblemished cloves with intact skins. Crop rotation (changing the planting location) also helps prevent the spread of viruses and fungi, and it’s always a good idea when you trim or deadhead neighboring plants to remove plant debris from the area in case it’s harboring bugs or disease.
VIRUSES ARE common, and although most aren’t fatal, they will affect a plant’s vigor. Symptoms of viruses can include striping, streaking, or mottling on the leaves and twisted or stunted leaves, and if one plant has a virus, it’s likely to soon spread to others via aphids or thrips. Practice prevention: keep plants healthy and unstressed by making sure they have enough water and a fertile soil.
A couple of stem rots caused by soilborne fungi in the Fusarium genus can affect the stem plate, leaving it with rotted roots, brownish discoloration, or lesions with a reddish fringe. Early symptoms include yellowing leaf tips and shoot dieback, though sometimes leaves show no symptoms at all. Blue mold, caused by various strains of Penicillium molds, can enter bulbs through damage during storage or can invade damaged cloves separated from the mother bulb too long before planting. Infected cloves may not grow or may produce weak plants with yellow leaves, though strong plants often overcome the disease. An infected bulb can easily spread the mold to its neighbors in storage.
Pink root, which is caused by a fungus active in temperatures above 75°F (24°C), attacks the plant’s roots, turning them pink. You might see a little leaf browning, but the plant doesn’t usually die. Pink root may reduce crop yields, however.
Rust, another fungus, shows up as yellow or white spots or streaks on leaves followed by orange pustules filled with orange spores. If the disease worsens, black pustules appear. High humidity and low rainfall encourage the disease, but, oddly, warm weather (above 75°F, or 24°C) or temperature below 50°F (10°C) inhibits it. Although rust is not often a problem, it will spread easily by wind if it gets a foothold—a late-1990s outbreak in California severely reduced crop yields. Again, prevention is key. Keep plants healthy and unstressed, without either too much or too little water, and avoid applying too much nitrogen.
WHITE ROT, caused by Sclerotium cepivorum, has been responsible for many crop losses in the United States and other parts of the world. It also affects other members of the Allium genus. It starts as a fluffy white mycelium—a network of branching, threadlike spores—on the stem plate, which then advances up the plant. Growth is stunted, and leaves yellow and die. If only one plant appears to be infected, both it and the surrounding soil should be dug up and removed and the adjacent soil fumigated. But once the fungus has become established, alliums cannot be grown on the site for many years.
When a cow has been three nights with almost no grass, give her a preparation of two parts grass to one part garlic stalks. A Brahmin can then partake of her milk and maintain propriety.
THE BOWER MANUSCRIPT
INSECTS THAT affect garlic include mites, and an infestation can destroy a bulb. Onion maggots and thrips sometimes attack garlic; the maggots bore into the bulbs, and the thrips chew on the precious leaves. Microscopic nematodes, or eelworms, eat garlic, onions, leeks, and chives, as well as celery and parsley. The nematodes are so tiny they’re invisible. In severe cases the bulb may separate from the underground stem and turn into a pulpy mass—sometimes when you try to harvest the bulb it’s not there. Planting only healthy, unblemished bulbs is the best way to prevent nematodes, but pouring hot water over cloves you’re about to plant might kill the little devils.
There’s one bug that’s scaring the garden gloves off garlic growers in eastern Canada these days: the leek moth, Acrolepiopsis assectella. It’s an uninvited European species that probably made its way to Canada on infected plant material, and it has been significantly damaging garlic crops in eastern Ontario, southern Quebec, and Prince Edward Island since it appeared in the Ottawa area in 1993, tunneling into and eating the leaves, scapes, and bulbs. It’s now reported in upper New York State. In March 2010 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency released a parasitic wasp in hopes it would control the moth, but results won’t be known for several years.
If you live in these areas and discover the leek moth, Paul Pospisil of the Garlic News suggests an old-fashioned approach to control: checking for cocoons and larvae daily and crushing them by hand to reduce the population. The larvae can reach just over half an inch (1.4 centimeters) in length and are yellowish-green with pale brown heads and eight gray spots on each abdominal segment. Adult moths are reddish-brown, about one-quarter inch (0.6 centimeters) long, with a white triangular mark in the middle of the folded wings; hind wings are heavily fringed and pale gray to black.
Gophers love garlic and will eat the whole crop if they can. Chester Aaron, who grows garlic in Sonoma County, California, and is the author of The Great Garlic Book, Garlic Is Life, Garlic Kisses, and more, protects his garlic by growing it in raised beds framed with wood and set on chicken wire. Grasshoppers can be a threat: in Texas it was reported that a heavy infestation in 2004 destroyed 24,000 plants; the varmints ate the tops and then somehow dug into the ground to get at the succulent bulbs. It’s impossible to protect against an army of grasshoppers, but for a smaller invasion Ted Meredith, author of The Complete Book of Garlic, suggests that floating row covers (plastic or fabric stretched over the bed on metal hoops, available at garden supply stores) could mount a defense for a short period. Row covers retain heat and if left on too long could bring the plants to maturity too soon.
How to Harvest and Store Your Bulbs
Harvesting
A few weeks before you dig up mature hardneck bulbs, remove the scapes so that the plant can put all of its energy into bulb development—some growers say that leaving them on can reduce the yield of a field of garlic by as much as 33 percent. Snip them off with scissors or carefully snap them off where you see a white or pinkish spot on the stem.
Digging up the bulbs is the most fun of all, but knowing exactly when to do it can seem complicated. With all garlic, both hardneck and softneck, if you harvest too early the bulbs won’t have reached optimum growth and flavor; too late and they will have burst their wrappers and left themselves vulnerable to bacteria, which would spell doom for successful storing. The bulbs might even have separated, leaving them useless for planting, although you could eat them right away.
Garlic should be harvested when some of the leaves are still green and some have browned, but exactly how many of each is a matter of discussion among some garlic growers. Some say half of the leaves should be brown; others say much more than half is desirable. Still others say the best time is when half of the leaves are half browned. Got it? It does get complicated, perhaps unnecessarily so. Commercial growers in California leave their softneck garlic in the ground till the tops brown and collapse, because they’re easier to harvest with no green stems. I start with the half-and-half-of-total-leaves formula and then follow my instincts. If the plant is still looking too perky, even though half the leaves seem nicely browned, I leave it in a few more days.
Generally speaking, most softneck garlic and the Asiatics, Turbans, and Creoles—which sometimes grow a short scape (it depends on their environment or their ancestry)—are content to stay in the ground longer than other hardnecks. There are no hard-and-fast rules for garlic, but it is this flexibility that makes it an easy plant to raise, despite all these caveats.
Dig plants individually, using a trowel or a fork to loosen the soil before you gently pull them up. Brush loose dirt off newly dug cloves or let it dry and fall off, but wash off sticky clay right away, being sure to dry off the cloves and hang them upside down so that water doesn’t enter the neck of the bulb. I trim off the roots at this point, but some gardeners leave them on until the final cleaning.
Let the bulbs lie uncrowded in a cool, shaded area, on a wire rack or a slotted surface, for a week or so. (I leave mine on the slatted bench built into our deck under an overhead trellis, and amazingly the raccoons leave them alone. I guess, unlike gophers, they haven’t discovered the gourmet delights of garlic.) Then brush off the rest of the dried soil—an artist’s paintbrush or a toothbrush works well—and tie the stems in small labeled bunches of one variety. Hang them in your garage or garden shed or on a rack in a protected place. They should cure for a few weeks to develop their flavor—four is a rough guideline, but two weeks is okay. It depends on how humid your climate is. Once the leaves and stems are quite brown and dead, the time is ripe to prepare your garlic for long-term storage.
If I play with garlic, my hands are bound to stink.
POMPONIUS, 110–132 BC
Storing
This is the knottiest problem for home growers who don’t have a cold cellar and want to store garlic for several months. Ideally, garlic you want to keep into the winter should be stored at 56 to 59°F (13 to 15°C) with low humidity—45 to 50 percent. A wine cellar is perfect. So, strangely enough, is my bedroom closet, which is next to an outer wall in our older house; there are some advantages to poor insulation. I discovered this quite by accident when I wondered why my clothes were so cold and stuck a thermometer on the floor of the closet. My garlic lasts for six to eight months there, depending on variety.
But garlic will last for three or four months under a wider range of temperatures, including cool room temperature, about 68°F (20°C). As with other root vegetables, warm temperatures dry out the cloves and humidity causes mold to develop. Some commercial growers say bulbs can be stored at the freezing point and a slightly higher humidity with good results. One experiment kept bulbs beautifully at exactly 27°F (–3°C) for eight months, and they stayed in good condition for up to two months after coming to room temperature. But I can’t control my freezer that precisely, so mine won’t be coming out of the closet.
Whatever you do, don’t store garlic in the fridge. Refrigerators hit that magic range from 40 to 50°F (5 to 10°C) where garlic decides it’s early spring and time to sprout. Sprouted garlic is edible but past its prime, especially if the sprout has grown to an inch (2.5 centimeters) or more.
Garlic needs air circulation, too, so don’t store it in paper bags. Most mail-order growers send the bulbs in mesh bags, which are ideal; I also save onion bags from the grocery store, and in a pinch I’ve used the legs of panty hose, with the feet cut out and tied off.
Storing garlic for planting in the fall is easy; it can be kept at anywhere from 50°F (10°C) to room temperature until it’s time to pop the cloves into the ground.
Garlic is at its juiciest when first harvested, and the flavor gets richer during storage. But there is a cutoff point when it starts to lose its bloom—just like carrots or potatoes stored too long. Generally speaking, hardnecks don’t last as long as softnecks, and their flavor peaks earlier. The Rocamboles and Purple Stripes should be eaten sooner than, say, the Silverskins. But this is general: the Creoles, one of the three mentioned earlier that are officially grouped as hardnecks yet grow only a short scape, if any, are among the longest lasting of garlic varieties—they’ll keep for up to a year in the right conditions. Labels are advisable when storing garlic. Again, for help with what to plant, plus tasting notes for a few varieties, see “A Garlic Primer.”
· GARLIC’S WILD COUSINS ·
Garlic grows wild, too, and some varieties are native to North America. Allium canadense, also called meadow garlic or wild shallot, grows mainly on the eastern part of the continent, from New Brunswick to Florida and west as far as Texas. Indigenous people relied on it as food and also used its juice as an insect repellent. It has narrow, grassy leaves and a dome of pink or white star-shaped flowers; its bulb is just over an inch (3 centimeters) in diameter and is covered with a dense network of brown fibers.
A. tricoccum, or “ramp,” grows in many parts of the continent and is so prized for the mild garlic flavor of its bulb and wide, short leaves that it’s an endangered species in the province of Quebec; in Maine, Rhode Island, and Tennessee, where annual festivals in its honor are common, it’s considered a plant of “special concern.” In the spring of 2011, more than 18,500 harvested plants on their way to various markets were seized by authorities in Quebec.
Allium vineale, sometimes called crow garlic, was introduced to North America from Europe and has invaded meadows and farm fields in many places, including Ontario, where it’s listed as a weed. It has grasslike leaves and greenish-white, pink, or purplish flowers that grow in clusters. It’s edible, though apparently not as tasty as other garlics. Cattle don’t seem to mind its taste, however, and its flavor often affects dairy and beef products.
· BABIES LIKE GARLIC, TOO ·
Many breast-feeding mothers avoid eating garlic because they fear it will upset their babies, but a couple of studies by Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, and quoted by Eric Block in his book Garlic and Other Alliums, suggest that infants may be attracted to garlic. The studies, done in 1991 and 1993, indicated that babies “remained attached to the breast for longer periods of time, sucked more when the milk smelled like garlic, and ingested more milk as well.” The babies in the study who had not been exposed to garlic in their mothers’ milk spent more time breast-feeding after their mothers consumed garlic capsules.
· SPRING PLANTING OPTION ·
Even in Gilroy, California, the garlic capital of the world, garlic is planted in fall so that the seed cloves experience enough cool weather to produce good-sized bulbs. But gardeners like to experiment, and many try spring planting to see what happens. If you want to try, choose softneck cultivars in the Artichoke or Silverskin subgroups and prechill cloves for three weeks at 45 to 50°F (7 to 10°C) to break dormancy. Plant in February or early March.
In the southern United States or other warm-winter areas, spring planting of prechilled bulbs is sometimes the only option. It also can work where winters are so frigid that cloves tend to freeze in the ground: prepare holes before freeze-up and plant cloves during an early spring thaw, covering with purchased potting soil. Spring-planted garlic generally produces smaller bulbs.
· GARLIC, THE BUG KILLER OF THE FUTURE? ·
Now that we’re aware of the dangers of using poisonous chemicals to kill garden pests, garlic may come into its own as a nature-friendly pesticide. For centuries garlic, onions, and leeks have protected themselves by releasing sulfur compounds into the air or the soil—or into the mouths of insects that bite them. Our ancestors knew this and used garlic as an insecticide and companion plant, and contemporary tests of oils and extracts of alliums against nematodes, beetles, mites, ticks, and more have produced impressive results. Garlic oil has also been shown to be toxic to larvae of the mosquito, which spreads malaria, dengue fever, West Nile virus, yellow fever, encephalitis, and other diseases.
· HOMEMADE BUG DETERRENT ·
To deter whiteflies, aphids, beetles, and mosquitoes, try this garlic spray. Be sure to completely cover the plant, including the undersides of the leaves.
4 ounces garlic extract
a few drops dish soap or insecticidal soap
1 quart water
Blend together and strain through cheesecloth. Dilute ten times and spray on plants, including undersides of leaves.
No garlic extract? Blend a whole bulb of garlic with 2 cups of water, allow to sit for a day, and strain. Add a few drops of dish soap and dilute with 1 gallon of water.