Northern Hemisphere Garlic Ranchers/2025 Crop

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

2025 crop behind the rolling average, but making its way during a cool, dry spring:

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The Gotch

[karstopography]

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Trimmed some of the driest of the garlic today. Definitely was a little late getting to harvest a good percentage of these with the split wrappers. Smells divine out around the picnic table.

[JayneR13]

The rains from the past two days have perked mine right up. There are still holes in the planting though, like cloves that were pulled or simply didn’t survive. But I have a few!

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[bower]

Slow but steady growing here. Not sure how far ahead of average, but I believe I'm usually well behind Wisconsin, so I had to go out in the rain and get pics today, just to show I'm pretty close to you guys! Still have mulch and wire on, plants are looking green no frostburns or the like, and they're all there, maybe one missing out of all the lot.. Apologies for raindrop splotches.

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[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

@bower, what digs up yer bulbs?

The Gotch

[bower]

IDK, Gotch. Could be vole, squirrel or even a bird.
Not a big pile of digging to show, so whatever it is, goes right down to what you planted here with a bit of bone meal scent perhaps? Then flung the disgusting clove, afar from the site.

I believe the mulch tearup here is due to wind and weather rather than animals this time.
Wire keeps the leaves from um leaving entirely.
That second bed was mulched with whole cut agrimony plant still green of leaf. Works a little better.

[rxkeith]

still waiting for bare ground here.

call me behind.


keith

[JRinPA]

Ill take pics tomorrow I hope. I have them covered to keep out the flies but I think it may have pulled up when we had those terrible winds last week.

[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

While still behind the rolling average, the enviably WEED-FREE Garlic got a primo boost from yesterday's 82°F/27.8°C heat.

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The Gotch

[rossomendblot]

Here's my Iberian Wight garlic. There's 65 plants in those 2 square metres. It's usually ready for harvest at the start of June, though we've had a very sunny spring so it looks like it could be closer to mid-May. No sign of rust yet, finger's crossed!

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[Cornelius_Gotchberg]

It's usually ready for harvest at the start of June, though we've had a very sunny spring so it looks like it could be closer to mid-May.

Beautimous! What's yer Hardiness Zone, and when do you's plant?

The Gotch

[bower]

Those are gorgeous @rossomendblot and way ahead of ours!

[rossomendblot]

It's usually ready for harvest at the start of June, though we've had a very sunny spring so it looks like it could be closer to mid-May.

Beautimous! What's yer Hardiness Zone, and when do you's plant?

The Gotch

I plant in October. We don't seem to use hardiness zones like in the US, but my climate is 'temperate maritime' and we don't get as cold as further inland, though the wind chill can be ghastly. Our winters are quite mild with an average minimum of 3 C (37.4 F) or slightly under, and the occasional frost. We did get to -17 C (1.4 F) back in 2010 though, and were the coldest place in the country.

[karstopography]

England, the British Isles, are well north of anything in the Continental United States. London is north of Calgary, Alberta and Edinburgh, Scotland is north of Ketchikan, Alaska.

The British Isles are blessed with warm ocean currents that moderate the effects of latitude. The British Isles were not even islands up until about 6,000 years ago when rising sea levels cut them off from Europe.

How it relates to garlic, I don’t know except that I think it’s hard to compare the climate and growing conditions of anywhere in England to anywhere in the US. Maybe the extreme northern and western edges of the PNW line up best with parts of Britain. Extreme cold or extended sub freezing weather is exceptionally rare near the ocean in either area, lots of moisture, clouds, mists, are coming off oceanic surfaces, overall cool and cloudy conditions dominate. The PNW might get more summer heat in a typical summer than the British Isles.

The sun at the latitude of the British Isles is so benign, even in June and July. I was in London fifty years ago come this July during a “heatwave”. A few of the local residents were literally fainting from the heat. It was hard for a young Texan to understand how 80-86°, 26-30° C could cause anyone to faint. I thought the weather was delightful. I’m not even sure it made it to 86°, but whatever it was it wasn’t hot or even especially warm to me. Humans are so adaptable, but maybe not as good with abnormal shock conditions.

The British Isles overall have such a beautiful climate to grow a lot of our favorite vegetables, fruit, herbs, and flowers. Maybe not with the heat loving vegetables, but most anything else.

Overall, the British back then didn’t seem to be especially fond of Garlic, but I know that has changed tremendously in the subsequent decades. The British Isles are exceedingly adept with anything produced from the dairy or were back then and I don’t imagine that’s changed.

The nicest people I have ever met anywhere and that were so consistently and genuinely nice and hospitable were the Irish. That was thirty years ago, maybe the Irish are as stressed out as everybody else now, I don’t know.

Do they grow garlic in Ireland? I don’t remember seeing a lot of garlicky stuff on menus back then.

[rossomendblot]

I think a lot of us Brits like the heat, given how many people go on holiday to cook in the sun in Southern Spain or Turkey. I quite enjoy the heat during the day, but the bricks of our houses hold on to the heat all night and air conditioning is rare, so it's impossible to sleep sometimes until the temperature drops in the early morning. We don't really get temperatures in the high 20s/early 30s except for a few weeks of the year, so we have little time to adapt.

[bower]

Except for the past three summers, our heat peaks are historically similar to yours, rossomendblot - no more than a couple of weeks or sometimes only a couple of days, and not enough adaptation time.

One thing I've learned about garlic, with our late springs and highly variable summers, is that it's all about degree-days. They are day length neutral but the really northern adapted varieties (and probably others, re Iberian Wight) may get quite a bang from the extra hours of sunshine (or just daylight) in terms of growth.

The Gulf stream is responsible for the mild weather in Europe, compared to our conditions here governed by the Labrador current, which makes us part of the Arctic cycle of ice melt and flow. We are at the same latitude as Nantes France, quite similar to Paris for that matter, much further south than Britain but much colder overall. So besides the general cloudy and rainy conditions we don't get the longer summer days and extra 'degree-hours' of more northerly locations.

That's a very mild winter you have as well. Very nice for you to have such an early garlic crop!