Northern Hemisphere Garlic Ranchers/2024 Crop

[rxkeith]

agree with bower.

garlic should be ok except for the leaves that have sprouted.
mulch with 3 inches of mulch that the garlic can either grow through
or be removed in the spring.
i plant usually mid october, sometimes early november if the weather is
erratic. wait much longer than that here, and the snow will bury ya.
my garlic never sprouts until spring.


keith

[GoDawgs]

@bower and @rxkeith, thanks for your help! I have passed along your input.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

@bower and @rxkeith, thanks for your help! I have passed along your input.

Late to the party, but agree with @rxkeith & @bower, 'specially the mulching.

Northern Hemisphere Garlic Ranchers/2025 Crop will launch shortly!

The Gotch

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

A friend of mine in Wisconsin (some miles west of Madison) is growing garlic for the first time and has a question that I can't answer:

Forgot to add, please invite yer WESconsinite pal to join the TJ crowd, and its well represented Dane County contingent!

The Gotch

[GoDawgs]

A friend of mine in Wisconsin (some miles west of Madison) is growing garlic for the first time and has a question that I can't answer:

Forgot to add, please invite yer WESconsinite pal to join the TJ crowd, and its well represented Dane County contingent!

The Gotch

I have but she's not an internet person. She just can't sit still, always outside cutting and hauling firewood with her husband or doing other outdoor chores. She does have a good sized garden for canning stuff but has never shown a passion for gardening. It's more like a chore that has to be done. She uses a lot of garlic but hates those from the store that have all those pesky little cloves in the middle. At least I got her curious enough about growing some. She wanted to try so I sent her three good heads that have big cloves and none of the little ones inside. It's a start.

[karstopography]

Garlic seems to me to be a pretty good low effort, low experience, low maintenance, low cost and small footprint type of crop, but we don’t have any bugs here that bother garlic and I guess that might not be true everywhere. I’ve been pretty neglectful of my garlic in past seasons, used little to minimal fertilizer inputs, was somewhat indifferent with weeding and spacing, employed little in the way of mulching, and yet most of the planted cloves have produced reasonably good heads of garlic and definitely ones that I can use in the kitchen. I imagine in Wisconsin garlic might even be easier to manage than it is here. I do vernalize my hardneck garlic types for several weeks, but that would be unnecessary up north.

[zeedman]

Been away for awhile...

Garden wisdom is to not plant garlic or onions in the same place twice. Presumably that is because most garlic pests & pathogens are soil borne, and any disease which appears one year will explode the next. I did that for several years, moving the 32' X 3' raised box every year. That was an enormous task, and took DW & me 2 days to do. But with my DW gone, no sign of disease, and me getting older, I decided to risk re-using the same bed for 2023/2024. I just added 4 bags of new topsoil, 4 bags of composted manure, and turned it all in. (After a good days worth if weeding out the grass roots which had crept in.) Then planted the same 8 varieties I've been growing.

The results were more than I had hoped for, my best garlic year ever! Nearly all bulbs were 2 oz. or over, except for one variety (an unknown Porcelain variety I had assumed to be Georgian Fire). I had planted 2 varieties of each type: Artichoke, Porcelain, Marbled Purple Stripe, and Rocambole. 25 cloves of the best performer in each type, 15 cloves of the runners up. This was the final weight of the top performers, from 25 cloves planted:

German White (Porcelain) 4 pounds, 2 ounces (avg 2.6 oz)

20241031_132428.jpg

Krasnodar Red (Marbled Purple Stripe) 3 pounds, 7 oz (avg 2.2 oz)

20241031_132127.jpg

Ron's Single Center (Artichoke) 3 pounds (avg 1.9 oz)

20241031_125507.jpg

20241031_123247.jpg

Ron's, showing cloves from a single bulb
Special Idaho (Rocambole) 3 pounds 12 oz (avg 2.4 oz)

20241031_135122.jpg

The results are actually even better than above, since I had given away 2-4 bulbs per variety prior to weighing. Since I am cutting back to only the most consistent performers, Estonian Red (MPS), Vic's (Rocambole) and Georgian Fire (Porcelain) were all given away, and not weighed.

I kept Carpati (Artichoke) because although temperamental, it can have a good year, and has 2 really great characteristics. Like Ron's, it has consistently large inner cloves, unlike most Artichoke varieties. But more importantly, it signals when its mature, by the tops falling over like onions. Since it is the first variety to mature for me, it tells me when to start checking all of the others. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of determining when to start digging my garlic.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

@zeedman I plant our Garlic in the same place every year without a hitch.

The Gotch

[bower]

Nice crop!! I have only planted into the last year's bed once - added a good bit of new compost like you, @zeedman, and I didn't have any special problems either. But I do get fusarium (I think) from time to time in a wet year (orangey colored around the roots or between wrappers) so I've stuck to the plan of having 2X garlic beds for at least one year of alternate crop.
@Cornelius_Gotchberg how do you recondition your garlic bed before replanting, and how many years have you been doing that?

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

@zeedman should have mentioned, that is some mighty fine lookin' Garlic. I don't recall where in America's Dairyland you's call home?

@bower, nothing extra special, I add compost and the Marsh Hay breaks down all on its own. I haven't had any problem with pests or disease...let's hope that continues.

Last coupla years I have meticulously doused the crop with Alaska Fish Fertilizer.

thumbnail_IMG_3499.jpg

The Gotch

[JayneR13]

Yummy fish emulsion! That's a smell only a gardener can love! Your neighbors OTOH not so much. Oh well.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

Yummy fish emulsion! That's a smell only a gardener can love! Your neighbors OTOH not so much. Oh well.

Anything that smells that...um...pungent HAS to be good, am I right. And our neighbors never complain, a situation facilitated by regular, in-season vegetable bribes...I mean deliveries...

The Gotch

[bower]

I did a side dressing of chicken pellet on most of my garlic this year, only one bed I did the liquid fish fert - they didn't do as well.
I have probably half gallon left of this Alaska fish fert that ... IDK, maybe it was old when I got it. It does not smell like fish whatsoever, and if you filled a jug with thick chicken poop that is about the consistency of it - not a bit nice to work with.
So I think my Alaska stuff is messed up. But maybe it was just too rainy for a liquid fert. The chicken pellets obviously helped the others, it was noticeable. Everything had been rained out severely over winter and spring.

[JayneR13]

A quick search suggests that rain may have been the culprit more than age regarding the fish emulsion. It's been a long time since I've used that, but the lack of fish smell does seem strange. I remember an unmatched pungency to that stuff that indeed makes it no fun to work with! You might consider dumping it into your compost pile, or a side pile if you're worried about it negatively affecting other things. Waste not, want not, right?

You're lucky in your neighbors! Mine hate my garden, especially the one to my east whose windows look out onto it. She wanted me to plant flowers years ago because they're pretty to look at. Well, they are, and I do have flowers planted, but veggies are food and I'm sure we've all noticed how much food costs! Even the farmer's market isn't especially a bargain, although that's where I do most of my veggie shopping. Humans. To quote the immortal Tony Soprano: can't live with them, can't kill them!

[bower]

@JayneR13 definitely rain is to blame, whatever happened to the fish stuff. Twice normal rainfall in June. Many of my biggest bulbs were split.
Not sure what wet weather in the fall will do to the garlic. It is very, very wet out there now. Mulch is some protection but IME if it freezes without snow cover, the frost heaves will be really bad. I've seen it before.