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Post by Drahkk on Jul 2, 2012 6:27:49 GMT -5
If you're just planting one big bed of garlic 4 inch spacings work fine. Personally I just tuck them in wherever they will fit. This year I have garlic growing between my squash, a few in the cukes, and several dozen among the tomatoes. They get shaded somewhat that way and don't end up quite as big, but I get enough to use.
MB
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Post by mountaindweller on Jul 3, 2012 2:25:22 GMT -5
Last year I planted them in the perennial flower bed, that idea was bad as you have to dig to get them up, but I still have a lot of them growing and use the green tops. It looked great especially the elephant garlic, but you cannot really harvest.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 4, 2012 0:01:53 GMT -5
We plant a minimum of 6" apart in staggered double rows 8" apart. If it's a large-bulbed variety, 8" apart. Those distances allow for a hoe to get between them for weeding. Experimented with one triple row at 8" all around last fall and not 100% happy with how it looks right now. It's almost as if the 3 rows are all competing for the amount of nutrients for 2.
Martin
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 9, 2012 13:59:02 GMT -5
My garlic is mostly undersized this year due to bad planting beds last fall and the fall- winter- spring drought. I can make the lightest pull on them and they come out. They are all yellow- not tan/brown. Last fall I was redoing all my beds to be nice and straight. That meant some paths would now be beds. The landlord was supposed to disc so I could plant garlic but he never did. So I put off the garlic planting as long as I could and finally had to prep the beds by hand. They were like cement! One I double dug and one I tried to till. It was so dry and hard and was freezing at night so no watering could really be done much. The bed I double dug was planted with softnecks and most are ok. The bed I tried to till with a little tiller was hardnecks and most are all yellow and barely in the soil. They even scaped poorly. I usually have more than enough so I will just save what I need to plant of the biggest bulbs and next year will be fine. I worried about my garlic quite a bit through winter and with good reason. It was unfortunate what happened in fall. It often happens that way with my land rental but now my beds are permanent so it won't happen again. Below is a photo of my (domestic) garlic (with a penny to show scale)  Note that this isn't a "sample of my garlic" this is the whole crop! (well nearly, but as the stuff that isn't in the picure are the tiny hadful that were even more undersized and actually rotted rather than cured, this is functionally my whole crop. While most of this is probably due to overcrowding, bad weather and the fact this is all first year rounds (and round are always smaller than heads) there is a little genetic trouble as well; one of the two garlics I planted has a tendeceny to "split) " at a very small size. A lot of the heads whose cloves I planted from were only the size of a walnut, quite a few were only as big as a grape (and they still were made up of a dozen or more cloves, which gives you some idea of how tiny those must have been). I'll probably replant the really purple ones (it may be small, but I have never seen such intense purple skin in a garlic) but as for the others, I just don't know. |
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Post by raymondo on Jul 9, 2012 16:14:36 GMT -5
blueadzuki, it looks as if it will take a good number of years to get those up to decent size!
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 9, 2012 18:52:34 GMT -5
blueadzuki, it looks as if it will take a good number of years to get those up to decent size! Ray, I'm afraid the situation is even worse. Given what I said about its ancestry, there is a real good change that a good portion of this garlic will never get up to decent size! as soon as the bulb reaches hazelnut to walnut size, it will split up into a head again, made up of tiny tiny cloves which will grow back into these super tiny rounds. I think that somewhere up in my drawer I have an orginal head from the ancestral stock ( I think there was one that managed to get home without shattering into in composite cloves, so I put it to the side) If I can find it, I'll try and post a pic, so you can see just how small the final heads of this stuff turn out. |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jul 9, 2012 21:31:38 GMT -5
Here is a photo of the most colorful garlic from my garden this year. They also happened to have been earliest to mature which is why they are in a photo all by themselves.  |
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Post by steev on Jul 9, 2012 23:01:03 GMT -5
Very pretty.
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Post by raymondo on Jul 9, 2012 23:16:09 GMT -5
Good looking heads of garlic Joseph.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jul 10, 2012 0:38:49 GMT -5
I am splitting my garlic landrace into multiple landraces this summer: An earliest landrace for market. A soft-necked diversity conservation landrace. A hard-necked diversity conservation landrace. A best soft-necked landrace for market. And then I'm planning on trying to induce the soft-necked into flowering and becoming hard-necked. Sheesh!
For this fall, I'm intending to plant the diversity landraces and breeding stock into rows separate from the market crop. This year they were all jumbled together, and it's making harvest more thoughtful than it needs to be.
My harvests are often thoughtful for many crops, but it would be nice sometimes when I feel rushed on market days to simply pick an entire row without evaluating individual plants as candidates for next year's seed.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jul 10, 2012 7:30:33 GMT -5
blueadzuki, it looks as if it will take a good number of years to get those up to decent size! Ray, I'm afraid the situation is even worse. Given what I said about its ancestry, there is a real good change that a good portion of this garlic will never get up to decent size! as soon as the bulb reaches hazelnut to walnut size, it will split up into a head again, made up of tiny tiny cloves which will grow back into these super tiny rounds. I think that somewhere up in my drawer I have an orginal head from the ancestral stock ( I think there was one that managed to get home without shattering into in composite cloves, so I put it to the side) If I can find it, I'll try and post a pic, so you can see just how small the final heads of this stuff turn out. as promised  |
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Post by raymondo on Jul 10, 2012 16:29:22 GMT -5
Perhaps fresh stock is in order blueadzuki.
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Post by bluelacedredhead on Jul 10, 2012 16:43:38 GMT -5
Lovely looking garlic, Joseph.  When I planted only Music, I put cloves about 4" apart in a patch, not rows. But now that I am growing out more than one variety, I need the rows so I know which are which. Even then, I seemed to have gotten a few mixed up  I always kept the largest to eat and smaller ones as seed stock. |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jul 10, 2012 17:34:58 GMT -5
I plant garlic about 4" apart in rows 18" apart. I plant bulb-to-row, with a 2 foot break between varieties. I don't keep track of names for varieties, but I save one bulb from each (bulb)row for planting next year in the breeding/evaluation patch.
In the market crop I typically break the cloves apart at home where it's comfortable, and then I plant into the ground willy-nilly.
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Post by littleminnie on Jul 10, 2012 19:25:27 GMT -5
Perhaps fresh stock is in order blueadzuki. Agreed and perhaps a soil test. I would trade some of my garlic for something else or I do have Paypal if you want to buy some at a good price. |
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