How is everyone's garlic beds looking this year? I went to check mine yesterday and raked off the leaves, which were used as winter cover. The ground is still frozen and there was no shoots showing. I'm hoping that removing the leaves will speed up thawing and sun can warm the beds covered with black plastic.

About a month ago I planted some refrigerated cloves to rootrainer cells and those have now sprouted. These will get planted in ground as soon as the ground can be worked.

Sari

That’s a lot of garlic! Good idea using the rootrainers.

i still have a snow covered garden here even with major snow melt over the past couple weeks.
we are supposed to get a major dumping of snow tonight through monday that will set us back a bit.
i did plant numerous small bulbils and a few larger bulbils in some of last years tomato/pepper cups.
they are coming up nicely in the kitchen window. i have a small bucket with hundreds of small bulbils
downstairs in our cool basement. what to do with them? i haven't decided yet.



keith

So nice to see the sun shining on the good earth.
I have just one bed that is finally empty of snow today. This one is close to my back door, where the wind pushed the drifts away from the house, and now I can step out into a tiny garden area that's free! Two beds at the back of the picture are also planted in garlic and are still deep in the snow. But nearly every day now we're above freezing, although we haven't gotten close to 10 C it's slowly increasing at last!

I looked out this morning after yet another snow... and I thought I saw garlic in that back bed.
Yes it is up. Time to remove the wire.
The sprouts are coming up anywhere the snow has been gone for a day. (even if it snows again, it is late for garlic to be up already by at least two weeks).

My garlic here in Oz is just starting to come through, roughly 8 to 10 vars up about 3 to 4 inches through the sugar cane mulch, photos to follow

I was surprised that my garlic didn't come up earlier this year, given how mild the winter was. In the past, it would come up in December or January, after warm spells, but I guess this year, the warm spells weren't enough of a difference. They just started coming up in late February. Looking great, now! The Italian Porcelain and Montana Giant are doing as well as the Estonian red - the usual fastest and largest in my garden, but I always have to try new ones! The Metechi is smaller than the rest, but always a favorite, since it stores very well.
A distant shot of the garlic row, along with a few other things. by pepperhead212, on Flickr

Whwoz wrote: ↑Sun Apr 26, 2020 3:17 am My garlic here in Oz is just starting to come through, roughly 8 to 10 vars up about 3 to 4 inches through the sugar cane mulch, photos to follow

I put a "thumbs up" for this and then realized that the winter is approaching there, so I am not sure if the above ground growth is a good thing and expected?

How are your winters? I know that Victoria is as close to the Equator as Mediterranean countries in Europe, but the ocean currents make a big difference in the climate around the globe.

Sari

svalli wrote: ↑Mon Apr 27, 2020 1:48 am

Whwoz wrote: ↑Sun Apr 26, 2020 3:17 am My garlic here in Oz is just starting to come through, roughly 8 to 10 vars up about 3 to 4 inches through the sugar cane mulch, photos to follow

I put a "thumbs up" for this and then realized that the winter is approaching there, so I am not sure if the above ground growth is a good thing and expected?

How are your winters? I know that Victoria is as close to the Equator as Mediterranean countries in Europe, but the ocean currents make a big difference in the climate around the globe.

Sari

Sari, all good here, we typically grow garlic over the winter as our summer is to hot for it. A lot of crops that you folks sow in the fall/autumn and overwinter under snow are grown over winter here.

Our winters are very mild by your standards. Where I grew up at Hill End, at roughly 270 m elevation, snow used to settle once maybe twice a year, this has not happened for over 20 years since about 1997.
Where we live at Trafalgar, roughly 80 to 100 m elevation, only once in 45 years may it have snowed. We get frost down to minus 3 C most years, a couple of years back we got down to minus 7 a couple of days in a row. We generally get maximum of between 12 and 15Cin winter, although after a frost 20 may get a nudge. In a perverse way, we welcome a frost, or at least the day after as it is generally fine and sunny.

We are in the area the inspired Crowded House to write "4 seasons in one day" if you know the song.

snow is finally off the garden, so i took a look the other day.
garlic is starting to poke up. not much, but its a start.



keith

rxkeith wrote: ↑Mon Apr 27, 2020 9:46 am snow is finally off the garden, so i took a look the other day.
garlic is starting to poke up. not much, but its a start.



keith

The sun came up.
The sun came down.
The heat came up.
The garlic fell down.
It will lay dormant all summer.
And come back in the fall.

My main crop porcelains (mostly Music) seem to be slower than others this time, maybe because of the beds they're in. The one at the back had snow on it longer than the others. But the one at the front (new bed) lost snow before anyone. I'm thinking perhaps it took some hard freezes of the soil and that may have slowed them down. [mention]pepperhead212[/mention] I don't know Metechi, but our smallest garlics Persian Star and Chesnok Red are the best keepers of varieties I know well so far. I still have some porcelain and they're still good, but will certainly run out of them before we get fresh. The PS and C are hopefully enough to cover us until crop time this year.
I'm really happy to see Germidour coming up because the softnecks keep even better. I didn't do so well with NY White (aka Polish White) softneck, and stopped growing them. But my friend reminded me how good it is to have a softneck when the others are used up or starting to sprout.
The other thing I like about softnecks is braiding them. Long keeping garlic is a good one to have in the fold.

I weeded my garlic row today! I Don't do this often, and there wasn't a major amount of weeds yet, but I was sitting with my back to that row, while readying my SIP buckets for tomatoes, so I figured, why not make use of that? I also noticed 3 or 4 plants chewed down to about 4" by something - I usually don't have any problems with rabbits or squirrels, which are my main pests here, though I have trapped a couple of groundhogs in the past. I'll have to watch for something out there. Hopefully, I won't have to fence them in.

Planted 124 Martin's. Squirrels dug up 7 or 8 but the rest looks great. Aiming for some 4" bulbs. We had some 3½" at We Grow Garlic but I have always thought that it is capable of bigger. Loaded the bed with horse manure so no excuse.
Martin

I can't believe how late a spring we're having, still pretty cold and the grass barely starting to green up yet. I did see a few bitten plants, and one hole where a clove was taken. Could be squirrel or it could be the grouse, I had to cover the shallots to keep those from being chewed to the ground by somebody, maybe grouse or even the hares. Some sort of rodent holes found around other beds too, but not the garlic, it's the thing they bother the least.
Here are the main crop porcelains and purple stripes. I would say they are about a month behind normal!
These porcelains are planted pretty tightly, so we shall see if they are smaller at this spacing. I'm working on opening up my old vegetable garden, and get it conditioned for garlic in the fall. More garlic I say!
The purple stripes Chesnok Red and Persian Star are in a small bed - posts blew down in a storm this week. Nasty weather, but these later garlic are as hardy as any, even if they don't produce large bulbs for me. Great keepers.

My garlic started doing this in April! We had a milder winter and spring was early. Usually, lilac starts blooming Mothers' Day but this year it is now almost done. And the garlic is doing the same, I guess. Hope the bulbs are doing as well as the stalks look. I see one elephant garlic has its scape and bud showing. I remember them blooming in July, in the past.

Yesterday we finally drove out to the country to work in our garden there. It has been cooler than normal these past couple of weeks but the garlic is doing fine despite the freezing nights. Many varieties had come up 100%, but some like Alexandra had few holes in the rows, which was surprising for usually reliable hardneck. Some varieties were just coming through the soil, so the survival rate may be better than what it looked for them right now.

I prepared a new bed next to the fall planted ones and planted my pre-sprouted garlic plants. Rest of the bed will be onions, but it was too cold to plant them yesterday and my back was already aching so much that I could not do any bending down anymore.


Sari

My old body is always at its worst coming out of winter... not a great match for the efforts required in early spring!
Another reason to love the garlic you planted in fall, all we have to do is rejoice to see it coming up.

I had to bite the bullet and actually buy garlic today! This happens some years, but this year it was because the garlic didn't store well, due to the non-stop rain I had last season, in the month prior to harvest. I'll see if this year is more cooperative.

The garlic looks good this year, except for a couple of heads chewed down, by something. Usually, the squirrels and rabbits (my major pests) don't bother garlic and other alliums in my garden, so maybe it was one of those stray groundhogs, that I rarely see.
Garlic, and on the right 3 just planted butternut seedlings. 5-15-20 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

I have now harvested all fall planted garlic and cleaned them and hung in the garage for drying. I again promised myself that I will not plant so many this fall.
Sari