Garlic

As seems to be the trend on gardening and allotment blogs thoughts are starting to turn to next year and plans for it and inparticular mine are turning to garlic.

My great Garlic Project of this year didn’t really got very well; firstly my careful labelling washed off in the rain, even after I went and bought special marker pens and everything, and then I think I harvested it a little to late as a lot of it seems to have pasted the nice big bulbs-with-lots-of-juice-cloves stage and split and formed into tiny little bulbs. This has meant I don’t really know what has grown well, or even if any of it has grown well. Apart from my Elephant Garlic which I couldn’t find a single bulb of so am classing that as a fail and probably won’t bother again for next year at least.

However one of the few things, ok only things, I have planned a head with is a garlic bed for this year which has been manured and rotting down under some black plastic, and a tonne of squash which have stretched themselves out over the top of the next bed, for most of the summer now and I would say is ready, right on time too.

Now the tricky part is; what garlic do I grow? Last year I tried Iberian Wight, Wight Cristo and Early Purple Wight. The first two were chosen after reading up on garlic and what might grow and then store best on my soil, etc. and them the latter was chosen as it seems to be a favourite of shops (and I had a voucher to spend). I could try the same and hope that it does better, or I could try something else.

The other thing I am trying to take into account is price and quantity. I want to grow A LOT of garlic as we use a lot of garlic, 2 – 3 bulbs a week and I would eat more if we had it, and growing garlic seems to cost a small fortune and if it doesn’t do very well then I am still going to buy in a lot on top of buying the growing bulbs themselves.

Whatever I decide I am going to have to make up my mind soon as this month is the month to be planting garlic; anyone have any suggestions for me?

Garlic – a project for 2011

I think I have maybe gone overboard with my garlic buying this year. After reading up on what varieties I decided that ‘Iberian Wight’ sounds like it is most likely to do best at the allotment, but after taking the time to read up on the subject could I find anywhere that sold them  locally, in short no. So I widen my search to online but still failed to find somewhere that didn’t charge an arm and a leg for a few bulbs and then postage on top. Not for the first few weeks of looking any way, then I came across a website that not only had them in stock but at, what I consider, a very fair price. Success!

This was shortly after the seed saving talk that I went to and so my head was full of never buying seeds again, and why not apply the same to garlic bulbs? So I added five bulbs to my shopping basket and headed for the ‘check out’, with only a slight detour via the mushroom growing kits. These five bulbs were to join the nine cloves of locally grown Elephant Garlic that I already had. All adding up to a reasonable amount of garlic to grow next year.

Then came an email just one day after I placing my order that tipped the balance from a ‘reasonable amount of garlic’ to ‘where am I going to grown all this, but it’ll be fine really. And we do like garlic…” a free £10 voucher for Thompson and Morgan and so I bought two* bulbs of ‘Wight Cristo’, which is described as “English production of pure white bulbs with an elegant bouquet, ideal for a wide range of dishes. Long keeping bulbs” and two* bulbs of ‘Early Purple Wight’, which seems to be the garlic that is sold in supermarkets so much be alright-ish. 

(*This was just the amount that they were sold in, if they had sold individual bulbs I would have just bought one of each)

One of my firm growing plans for 2011 are to grow things following the biodynamic calendar, but I also love tradition folklore and have grown-up knowing that you “plant garlic on the shortest date, to harvest on the longest day”.

And it is this that has set me up with a project for 2011 as this years shortest day fell on a biodynamic flower planting day, not a root planting day. I have already planted one bulb of ‘Iberian Wight’ on the 21st of December, e.g. the shortest day, I will plant one bulb tomorrow (29th December), which is a biodynamic root day, and then one bulb on the day after (30th December), which is another flower day but not the shortest day.

I have bought a pack of flower pots so as they will all be started off in the same sized pots and using the same bag of compost, as the ground outside was frozen with about two inches of snow on top on the 21st, which only leaves when to plant them out on the allotment to decide.

The rest of the garlic I will plant on a root day, most likely tomorrow.

Allotment – 04/04/2010

Deciding what to plant; my 99p store haul, chitted potatoes and my plastic bag mat - 4th April 2010

I spent some time at the allotment this afternoon with mother and middle-younger-sister. We have had the plots since a year ago last Friday, the soil on the beds that were manured last year is so nice now.

Whilst we were there I planted out some garlic, onion sets (Setton) and sowed some carrots (two rows of Chantenay Red Cored 2 and one of Early Nantes 5) and planted the first potatoes, Mimi and Charlottes. I used a plastic bag peg loom mat to kneel on, it is one of the biggest mats I have made and was very comfy folded over a few times.

Weekend working

This weekend was really good and productive for me, inspite of the weather forecast predicting rain and high winds it really wasn’t that bad during the day.

On Friday I got up late even though I’d plan to get up and start the day, over Christmas I got into the habit of not going to bed until late (or late for me) and sleeping in in the mornings. I have to sort it out though, even though I enjoy a lay in, I also enjoy getting up and spending the day doing things, even just little things, and it never really feels like I get much done if I have a lay in. Me and Rhys cleaned out a goat house, and the goat yard and then in the afternoon Little Miss Green from MyZeroWaste came to visit. She wants to be a farmer when she’s older but is too young to join the young farmers group; I remember I use to get so annoyed with being too young for things when I was her age. I would make up my mind that I wanted to do something, or learning something, find a way that I could and then be told I was too young when as far as I was concerned I was just as able, if not more so, then the ten year olds who didn’t really want to be there. Any way, we spent a nice afternoon with all the animals, went and milked the Primrose, bedded down all the chickens and cuddled the rabbits. 

On Saturday I got up late again and spent most of the afternoon in the veg garden clearing up. Someone from freecycle came and collected a couple of dozen bags of manure, which is good as where I’m planning on planting the sweetcorn is looking, er… big, tall, over flowing, all three really. (photo coming soon…)

I’m still waiting for my Mimi seed potato to arrive, they are a dwarf potato and I’d plan that if I grow them in the poly tunnel we could be eating home grown spuds for Easter, but it’s starting to get late for that so I planted some ‘Charlotte’ and another kind of red potato that I’d saved when our local Lild had a British special potatoes in. I stored then in a draw in layers of news paper and got them out the other day. Even though they’ve been in the dark they have started to chit nicely and aren’t looking light starved. The ones that I haven’t planted are in their draw on top of a book case now. The wind was starting to get up as it was getting dark, and then not long after it had got dark it poured it down.

It was fine by the next morning though; I got up earlier and spent some time in the garden again. There seems to be a lot of garlic coming through where I grow it last year, which isn’t too big an issue but I was going to grow it somewhere else as it had a little but of rust there last year. But it’s too much of a shame to move them now and they seem to be growing well enough.

At about lunch time it started to cloud over so I came in and made some Hob-Nob biscuits. It was the first time I’ve tried baking in the new Rayburn, to begin with it was far to cool and then I put to much wood on and I cooked the last tray with the door to the oven a jar and they still went a little black. Still tasted good.

Winter Solstice

Today was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. From now on days will be getting longer and everything with start to wake up.

As a sort of celebration I have spent this evening making paper pots and sowing peas, carrots (to be grown in buckets until the warmer weather when they can go outside) and a few leeks. I’ve been reading a little bit about how leeks can be started off now in polystyrene boxes  so thought I would try it.

The carrots and leeks were also to do my second bit of moon planting, so far I’ve only managed root crops on the right day, last weekend I planted some onion sets and garlic.

Rhys has spent this evening making chocolates for Christmas presents, and when I first got home from work we tried to ‘candle’ the quail eggs. It didn’t work but I’m hopefully, the weight has changed in them from how it feels when they are first laid. It will be time to stop turning them in the next day or two ready for hatching.

Cheese, gardening and days off

Ok, this weekend are my first two days off the past two weeks, and I’m really glad of them. There is only so much you can get done in the evenings once you get in for work, just making sure I’m got enough clean work clothes (work and ‘animal’ clothes are something you have to have here) when it’s raining on and off all the time is almost a full time job. We don’t have a tumble dryer.

Any way. Milk is the other big job at the moment. Milking is taking about 45 min – 1 hour, youngest-sister and Mother are doing that, and then collecting the cream, bottling milk and then sorting that days milk is also taking up the best part of an hour. And now we’ve Had to start making cheese, it was starting to make itself really. Before we’ve only really made soft ‘cream’ cheese but this weekend I got the cheese press out and had a got at using that, and it makes REAL cheese! It even looks like real cheese, very posh real cheese in fact.

So Saturday was spent making cheese and cleaning the kitchen and then we had lasagne, with loads of veg either from the local farm shop or from the garden (the nettles came from the garden) homemade pasta, I was layering the pasta on as Rhys rolled it, with homemade cheese in the sauce and on top. It tasted really good.

It was a really nice relaxing day.

Sunday I spent mostly in the garden, when it wasn’t raining, weeding and I harvested the garlic and put the bean plants out. The sprouts and purple sprouting have caterpillars so I’ve feed as many of them as possible to the chickens, and a white butterfly I caught which the chick went mad for.

In season this week

I’ve just joined the ‘Eat the Seasons’ newsletter and this week in seasons food are:

Rasberries, courgettes, cucumber, fennel, french beans, garlic, blueberries, cherries, gooseberries.

There are LOADS of wild rasberries in the woods near us but there still very green, but there is a lot of fruit there.