Late April Garlic Snapshot! Let's see them. Come one come all

[GrowingCoastal]

Here garlic needs a raised bed for good drainage. I have found pots, since I lack ground area, to be a good solution. My 3.5 gal pots grow 4 or 5 heads nicely. I use promix hp, new and used, plus mushroom compost, 1/3 each. In the ground I too was getting pink root/bulb from being too wet. The pots dry out and I can easily tell by the weight if they need water by lifting one edge to test.
Elephant garlic does well this way too with 1 per 1 gal pot.
Hummingbirds like the flowers of it and I like the EG to be portable for mixing in with flowers.
Last year I tried large purple Russian garlic in a 1 gal pot and it did well too.
My garlic in pots heads up nicely and compares well with any grown around here.



Last year's May 4


Guard dog on duty

[bower]

They look awesome, Coastal.
And Pure Harvest is right, JR - you've got some beautiful foliage there. Whatever you're doing, the garlic is loving it.

[Shrinkrap]

Nice cloves! Thanks all, for the feedback about pink root. I've posted pictures elsewhere of evidence of several other causes of yellow leaves and flopping; I'll add them later if it would help me or anyone else.

Beautiful garlic!

[velikipop]

Here is a pic of some of mine.

[JRinPA]

Thanks! They do look good right now, and are a nice contrast to the bare beds with tiny sprouts just coming up. This pretty much grows itself, since it is so well acclimated. All I've done is harvest, dry/cure and re-plant it at roughly the right time into broadforked beds with lots of good compost and a little 10-10-10. It still looks the same as the walking stuff, just bigger bulbs and much easier to dig up.

I used the biggest bulbs for planting the raised box, but still had nice ones for over at the comm garden. This garlic has a lot of cloves per bulb, maybe 12? From the outside it might look like big cloves but upon bulb breakage the big ones may be doubles or even triples. So I end up planting perhaps 2-5 of the cloves from each broken bulb, maybe planting a big tight double clove as twins, and putting the rest of the smaller cloves into a brown bag for first cooking use.

It was not so long ago when we would dig some up in May just to get them out of the way for tomatoes, move the clumps somewhere else in the garden, and not dig any up to eat until they were well past prime. Any and all improvement is due to the posts here on tomatoville.

[JRinPA]

Very nice, velikipop. What is the fencing for? Trample protection from the dogs?



GrowingCoastal, I can just about smell that garlic in your second pic. It may be the imagery of the huge bulbs just before that while scrolling down, or the fact it is big as corn.

[velikipop]

Yes, that is exactly what it is for. We have a year old pup that has yet to learn that the beds are off limits. She has done a lot of unwanted pruning of plants and trampling.

[velikipop]

Coastal, wow that is really great looking garlic. I would never have thought that growing it in a pot would produce such nice large bulbs. I bet the watchdog also helped by keeping all the garlic pests away!

Alex

[GrowingCoastal]

Originally Posted by velikipop

Yes, that is exactly what it is for. We have a year old pup that has yet to learn that the beds are off limits. She has done a lot of unwanted pruning of plants and trampling.

Obviously your pup is just a little too young yet. Mine even mows the lawn a little.

It so often rains a lot here in June, just before garlic harvesting time so, not so good. In the pots if it seems wet and going to rain I can turn pots on their sides and no more rain can fall on the soil in them.

[GoDawgs]

I dug a few more this morning to see how they're coming along. Still small...



...but they're starting to divide. Hard to see in the pic but I can feel individual cloves starting. Progress even though the plants are ugly as sin.

[Whwoz]

Here I have seven different varieties just starting to poke their tops up, plus two Monaro Purple cloves that broke off when the plants were harvested last season have put their tops up
In order, Italian White, planted Monaro Purple, missed Monaro Purple

[Shrinkrap]

Very helpful!

[bower]

Whwoz, that is so cool, that your garlic is coming up in sync with ours way north. I guess they don't mind being a winter crop, either. (Your winter is probably as warm as our summer )

[Whwoz]

Originally Posted by bower

Whwoz, that is so cool, that your garlic is coming up in sync with ours way north. I guess they don't mind being a winter crop, either. (Your winter is probably as warm as our summer )

Indeed it is Bower, out winter days typically max out between 12 and 15C and the garlic grows very happily at those temps