How To Grow Garlic From Bulbs. How To Keep Your Garlic Crop

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Bulb garlic

Winter garlic is good for everyone: early ripening - ripens for pickling vegetables, and fruitful - bulbs and cloves are larger than those of spring. Large teeth are very pleasant to clean, but I don't really want to plant them. If a spring crop can have several dozen cloves in its head, then a winter crop can have from 4 to 12. This means that you will plant a significant part of the crop again, which is completely unprofitable.

However, there is an alternative - winter forms of garlic, as a rule, are arrowed, i.e. form arrows, from which small chives grow. They are called air bulbs. They are enclosed in a sheath, and one plant can have up to 100 bulbs.

This is where the real breeding reserve lurks! If you want to grow, say, 200 heads of garlic, then only 2-3 plants are needed for planting when propagating by bulbs.

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But these are not all the benefits. In addition to saving planting material, it is no less, and perhaps more important, that when sowing bulbs, the sowing fund is healed. After all, the causative agents of garlic diseases are in the soil and are transferred when the cloves are planted with them. Bulbuses, on the other hand, do not have contact with the ground and, therefore, are not carriers of infections.

However, there are also negative sides. When planting garlic with bulbs, you can get a crop of normal heads only in the second year, which means that there will not be one year from a specific unit of area. In addition, not everyone succeeds in experimenting with the propagation of shooting garlic with bulbs: someone does not know how to sow correctly; someone tried it but failed. In some, the bulbs are frozen, in others they have dried up, in others the bulbs have grown, but small. In general, not without problems.

However, growing good garlic from bulbs is not so difficult - just follow a few rules.

The first is to grow good bulbs

To do this, it is enough to leave arrows on several plants grown from the largest cloves (for the rest they break out to increase the size of the heads). The arrows are first coiled. As they grow, they straighten, and as soon as they finally straighten, it is necessary to harvest without delay. In this case, the harvest is both heads of garlic and bulbs.

Plants must be harvested entirely, tied in bunches and hung in the attic for 3-4 weeks. During this time, there will be an outflow of plastic substances in the leaves and stem to the bulb and air bulbs, and they will gain weight. After the stem dries up, you can separate the heads with the bulbs, being careful not to damage the covers.

The second is to plant the bulbs correctly

This can be done both in autumn and in early spring (in this case, the beds must be prepared in the fall, since it will not be possible to dig up in mid-April). True, both options are faulty. During autumn sowing, some of the bulbs may freeze out, some protrude from the frost to the surface, and in the spring they have to be deepened again. And for spring sowing, it is not always possible to keep all the bulbs intact - some of them dry out.

If you prefer to store the bulbs until spring, then when stored warmly for a month and a half before sowing, they should be disassembled and kept at a temperature of 4 … 5 ° C, for example, in a refrigerator. What for? Thus, the spring of the biological clock is wound up at the bulb. If this is not done, the plants do not "feel" the time, will remain green and grow until late autumn, and sometimes even shoot. Then you will get medium-sized, immature heads with small teeth, which are of no interest either as a commodity head or as a planting material.

Plants from the chilled bulbs before planting stop growing in early August. In this case, a head is formed from one large round clove up to 3 cm in diameter, the so-called one-tooth. Before planting, the bulbs are soaked for a day, changing the water 3-4 times. The emerging teeth are removed.

They are planted to a depth of 2-3 cm every 3-5 cm in a row and 15-20 cm between rows. Planting must be mulched, for example, with a layer of hay about 5 cm thick. This allows you to keep moisture in the upper, root-inhabited layer of the soil, then there is no need for frequent watering, weeding and loosening.

The third is to dig it up in time

When the leaves begin to turn yellow, dig out the garlic - this will be around mid-August. If you are late in harvesting, the aboveground part of the plants will die off, and it will be difficult to find bulbs in the ground. Garlic is dried for 2-3 days in the sun, spreading it in a thin layer on a film and covering it from dew at night. Then they are tied in bundles and dried in the attic. Grown in this way one-toothed is a full-fledged material for autumn planting. The next year, large heads of garlic are obtained from them.

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How to store garlic

It is very difficult to save garlic in an apartment - there are big losses. For example, I use this method: after completely drying the garlic in an apartment with the batteries turned on, around November, I put the heads in three-liter glass jars.

Having filled them two-thirds, I add a bag of salt to the jars and close them with plastic lids. After that, I store them in a subfield at 1 … 3 ° C, taking out the garlic as needed.

Of course, this option is not suitable for all gardeners. Not everyone has underfloor storage. But in the literature, there are many other ways to preserve garlic in winter. Let's consider some of them.

1. In late autumn, pack the heads in plastic bags, bandage, wrap in several layers of newspaper and bury in the area. When cold weather comes, cover this place with tomato or some other tops. True, such garlic can only be used in the spring, when the snow melts and the heads can be dug out.

2. In a regular parcel box with holes in the walls, pour a layer of salt, put a row of heads, which also fill with salt on top. Then put the row of heads back down, and add salt again - and so on to the very top of the box. The authors of the method claim that the garlic in such conditions will remain juicy until spring.

3. If you store garlic in the kitchen, where the temperature is 18 … 25 ° C, then in no case pack it in plastic bags: in them the heads suffocate, prey and rot. Experience has shown that it is best to store garlic in bags of dense fabric, sprinkling it with dry onion husks. Garlic is well preserved in dry sifted wood ash or in dry sawdust.

4. Place the unpeeled heads of garlic in an enamel bowl and cover with water so that it completely covers the garlic. Stand for three days. Change the water daily - morning and evening. Then peel the heads off, put them in glass jars and fill them with brine (two tablespoons of salt per liter of water). You can add a little hot pepper, then the garlic will taste like pickled - without the use of vinegar and other spices. In this filling, the garlic stands for about a week until the bubbles cease to stand out. Then the brine is poured to the top, and the garlic is kept in it for about a month. Packaged in jars and closed with a regular plastic lid, salted garlic is ready to eat. Keep it in the refrigerator, but it is better - near the balcony or front door, where it is cooler. There it will not deteriorate and will acquire a pleasant taste over time. It is a great addition to soups, gravies and condiments.

5. You can store garlic in sunflower oil. Pour the peeled teeth into a three-liter jar, fill with oil and close with a plastic lid with holes so that the garlic "breathes". In such a "package", being in the refrigerator, it does not deteriorate for a very long time and is always ready for use. The oil will also develop a pleasant garlic scent.

6. And you can also make garlic powder, which is so convenient to use as a seasoning for a variety of dishes where the recipe requires garlic: for meat, fish, poultry, salads, etc. To do this, you just need to peel and wash the chives, then cut them into thin plastics and dry them thoroughly, and then grind them. The only "but": if you dry the garlic, not well enough, then you will not be able to grind it. Perhaps a meat grinder will take it, but at the exit from it you will not get a powder, but a viscous viscous mass, which will then be very problematic to turn into a powder.