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Planting garlic
leesmall257
Posts: 22
in Fruit & veg
im planning on planting my garlic this week, any advice would be welcome
0
Posts
Reasonably free draining soil, break up the bulbs into individual cloves, only plant the fat ones, plant each clove pointy end up - a stretched hand width spacing between cloves. They don't seem too fussed on depth but I put mine in so they have roughly their own height in soil depth above them. Keep the weeds down. There's not much more to it, really.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Thanks
mines been in since late October and is already 6 inches tall ready to ride out the winter.
the problem garlic has is it can rot before it roots, so I start mine in small 8cm pots in the greenhouse and plant out once the roots are showing through the bottom. (making sure to pick a day when frost isn't going to be happening for a couple of days to get them settled in).
Would you recommend starting in my greenhouse then? May take a couple of months to be ready for allotment
You can do if you don't have anywhere suitable but it does resent root disturbance so I wouldn't chose to do that unless you need to. It will stand the cold, it just doesn't cope well with sitting in heavy wet soil - hence my 'reasonably free draining' comment above. I've always sown mine direct, usually about 12 cloves each of two different types. In mild wet winters (2013/14, comes to mind - I don't think we had a single day when it didn't rain that winter nor any frost at all) I have lost maybe 2 or 3 out of 24. But in a 'normal' winter they've all come up fine.
“It's still magic even if you know how it's done.”
Straight in the soil it is then cheers
Bencurto; you want fertile (well fed with compost / manure) and well draining. This means the water doesn't sit in the soil for days on end as garlic seem to rot easily. I found building a trench by my garlic to aid drainage helps if the soil is very wet.