Blog: Quick! There’s time to get your cloves in…
One of the easiest crops to start with is autumn-planted garlic – you can even grow it in a trough or large container if you don’t have a proper garden. I prefer planting garlic in the autumn, although you can also plant it in the spring if you’re too late (check when your cultivar is best planted).
Most books will tell you November is the latest you can get them in, but if your soil is still workable and not waterlogged, you can get away with early December. This season, I’ve chosen Marco, a new softneck (you can also use hardneck types) variety for me. It has a strong, distinctive flavour and can be stored for months if kept cool and dry. Oddly, of the three bulbs, one had a distinct pink tinge, while the other two were creamy white.
All you need to know here!
For full instructions on planting, growing, harvesting, pests and diseases, visit my garlic growing guide. I have some bamboo fence raised beds I made so that I don’t have to bend as much. It’s a good medium to use – you buy 30cm lengths on a roll, fastened with double lengths of wire.
Every so often, one of the bamboo stakes is longer than the rest, which you simply hammer into the soil with a mallet. Obviously, there are gaps, so I lined the ‘walls’ with thick cardboard.
Lifting the growing area away from my heavy clay soil means it warms up much more quickly, and I use the technique of lasagne layering to build up the growing medium organically – cardboard sandwiched with green and grown organic matter plus the contents of my Bokashi composter from Hozelock. Despite its association with warm weather climates, garlic needs a spell of cold weather – 30-60 days of temperatures between 1-10ºC.
How to get lots of cloves
This is so the single clove you plant will form a bulb of separate cloves. If planted too late in spring, you will end up with one large clove. My raised bed soil has a lot of organic matter, so it’s a simple matter of adding 25g per square metre of Growmore raked into the cleared soil.
Garlic needs a sunny, well-drained site, and as it doesn’t cast much of a shadow, weeds can be a problem, so you’ll need to hand-weed beds to stop the invaders from competing for nutrients and water. Plant each clove 2.5cm (1in) deep, spaced 10-15cm apart, in rows 30cm apart. For the final touch, I covered the bed with old metal grids from greenhouse shelves to deter cats from digging in the soil or birds from pulling out the cloves when they break through.
