Another Public Service Announcement

How to grow Garlic

Every once in awhile, as a part of my Missionary Work, I do a Public Service Announcement. This one is about Planting Garlic, especially important today in light of CoVid-1984.

Garlic is probably one of the easiest things to grow. No animals eat it, and no bugs attack it. And if you do it right, you don’t even need to do any weeding and will have 100% yield. (Well, just be a Contrarian, off the top of my head I can think of two even easier things to grow¹). You only have to do three things:

• Plant the bulbs in the Fall;

• Right around 01 June look for the seed sprouts and pinch them off (you can eat them); and

• In July when the garlic leaves begin to turn yellow, don’t forget to HARVEST THEM!!! (And watch out for Chiggers).

OK, the above 3 Bullet Points with some more Details below (I hate details; I’m more like a Big Picture Gestaltist person myself).

Planting:

You plant the cloves individually in the fall when the leaves have fallen from the trees (see why below). It’s good to have “loose” soil — not clay. In my first garlic bed I mixed in some sand, peat moss and composted manure. After a number of years the soil will have good “tilth”. And, as with many other herbs, there seems no need to rotate, though I do let the beds go fallow every once in awhile planted with Crown Vetch and whatever else grows (no weeding). A good long-handled “irrigator” is nice for breaking up the soil. Every year I also add an inch or two of composted manure.

The ROT (Rule of Thumb) for planting seeds is to plant them about 3 times their size below the surface of the soil (Tobacco seeds are so small they have to be planted on TOP of the soil and they won’t even germinate unless they get direct sunshine). I push them into the ground (root side down, like DUH!) about 2 finger digits. Plant them about 6 Inches apart; you can plant them closer together, and you’ll have more garlic bulbs in your patch, but the bulbs will be smaller.

After you plant them, cover them with about 3 inches of leaves (now you know why to plant them after the leaves have fallen!). I also add some sticks across the top to keep the leaves from blowing away. In the Spring, take off the sticks but leave all the leaves. Almost all the garlic shoots will pierce right through the leaves; a few may need a little help.

Leave the Leaves and no Need to Weed. (I am such the Poet).

Pinching

Ever leave radishes too long in the ground until they start bolting (making seeds)? You pull them up and all you have is a thin root — no radish. So too your garlic will be really small if you don’t pinch off the seed shoots. So, for about a week or so, beginning about June 1st (and you can mark this date on your Calendar), you have to look at your bed EVERY DAY for about a week and pinch off those shoots. You may think you’ve gotten them all, but many will grow that pinched-off shoot again. That’s their Prime Directive: to make seeds. You’ll miss a few, no big deal; you’ll have a few small garlic bulbs and some garlic flowers and then seeds which some people think eating is the cure for the common cold (and who knows, maybe CoVid-1984).

Harvesting

Right around when the Blackberries and Chanterelles are out in July, you’ll notice some of the garlic leaves start turning yellow. And you may say to yourself, “Oh, sometime I should get around to pulling them up, but I need to clean the house”, and so you procrastinate a bit. Well, I’ve done that, and after a few weeks, go out and there are NO garlic plants — those big stiff stalks have just plain disappeared, and then you have to go digging up the whole bed searching for the garlic bulbs. After I harvest them I often sprinkle the ground with some Crown Vetch seeds — a good nitrogen-fixing ground cover that makes nice violet flowers.

AND

Wash off the bulbs gently with your hose set on the “shower” setting, spraying up from the roots, and let them dry on your porch for a week or so. If you want to do the Martha Stewart thing, let them sit till the stalks get limp, and you can braid them and hang them in your kitchen and have dried leaf parts all over your kitchen for the next year. I snip off the stalks and put the bulbs into a bowl in my pantry, and they will still be good next year when you get your next harvest. I save the BIGGEST ones for next year’s planting.

I started out with a couple of heirloom bulbs from Kirk and Linda down the dirt road from me when I was living in MI — now I plant about 75 every year. And, if you follow these instructions, more or less, you will get 100% yield.

So, starting with a single bulb with at least 10 cloves per bulb, if you plant every clove and never eat any, doing the simple math, in a mere 6 years you could have over a Million garlic plants and in 12 years, a Trillion bulbs.

Homework: how may years before your crop would exceed the mass of the

1. Earth;

2. our Galaxy, and ultimately;

3. the Universe?

1. Off the top of my head, even less work:

Pear Trees. I planted a couple about 30 some years ago, and they still make a bunch of wheelbarrows full of pears every year. (You need two so that they can cross-pollinate; one won’t do). Processing them is the real work. You can make:

• Canned “Rings” or “Halves”;

• Canned Pear Butter;

• Canned Pear Nectar (using a juicer [juice if you dilute it]);

• Dehydrated pears slices (not bad);

• Or just eat them.

Asparagus. Plant it once and you will have it every year doing no work at all (about 15 years and counting for me).

And, I’m very lazy by nature. Please leave in the comment section any other zero-work things to grow and I’ll get right on it, or at least think about it and procrastinate about it for quite awhile. Maybe even add to my List of An Infinite Number of Things I Could Do.

AND/OR. I spotted a huge patch of wild garlic growing along the side of the road. I could just go there in June and pinch them … and harvest them in July.