Growing Winter Garlic: Agricultural Technology

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

Small secrets of large garlic. Part 1

I get this winter garlic every year.

There have already been a lot of publications about the cultivation of garlic in the magazine. I don't think it's worth repeating everything again. I just want to highlight some of the accents that seem important to me. This is especially true for the cultivation of winter garlic.

Communicating with our Omsk gardeners, I noticed a sad tendency: recently, many people have not been successful with garlic. The winter of 2009-2010 in our region was critical for garlic. In October, frosts below -20 ° C lasted three weeks without snow. Further - worse: almost the entire winter the thermometer stayed around -30 ° С. As a result, the ground was frozen to a depth of more than three meters. Water pipes laid below 2.5 meters have frozen in many places. On my site, the well was usually ready for use in early May. This year it thawed only in mid-July. Summer turned out to match winter. Ice at a depth of 2-2.5 meters lasted until half of the summer, cooling the soil from below and cutting off the rise of capillary moisture from the depth.

At the same time, the air temperature remained unusually low until June. Vegetation of all plants was delayed by 2-3 weeks. And then - multi-day heat within + 30 ° С without rain. Winter garlic died in many gardeners. Almost all of them survived on my site. And not only survived, but also gave a good harvest. The average head mass was 60 grams. There were also many 100-gram heads. The harvest of this extremely extreme season has finally convinced me of the correctness of the developed technology for growing winter garlic.

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It is very important that the soil for the garlic is loose. The best soils are sandy loam. But I have a heavy loam. And not plowed and not dug for many years. The soil is porous in structure, with an abundance of voids, but solid, not crumbly. In such soil, root crops and potatoes feel comfortable. But garlic doesn't like the hardness of the soil. Apparently, the growing head does not have enough strength to push the solid ground. I was convinced of this by conducting a simple experiment. He loosened half of the garden in the spring, left the other half untouched. The whole garden bed was covered with fallen leaves of trees all season. As a result, on the loosened part of the bed, the heads grew twice as large.

The experiment was repeated the next year. And again the same result - the heads on loose soil are twice as large. It became finally clear - the soil for garlic should not only be porous, but crumbly, such as sandy loam or compost.

Making the soil crumbly is not difficult, you just need to dig it up with the addition of a large amount of compost or sand. But at the same time, the established structure of the soil with a system of capillaries and pores is disturbed. The life of the microcosm of the soil is disrupted. The water stops rising - there are no capillaries. With my non-irrigated agricultural technology, this is unacceptable. It turns out that for me it is necessary for the soil in the root area to remain porous, but firm - so there is enough air in the soil and the capillary rise of water works properly. And in the area where the heads are located, the soil should be crumbly. I don't use compost.

The solution turned out to be simple. I cultivate the soil with the Krivulin Tornado cultivator to a depth of 5-7 cm. I level the bed with a rake. On top, I evenly pour sand with a layer of 3-4 cm. With a small Fokin flat cutter I draw grooves to the depth of the loosened layer. In this case, the bulk of the sand is in the grooves. Then I plant the garlic cloves practically in the sand - I bury them to a solid base. It turns out that the bottom of the cloves is at a depth of about 8 cm. Above the upper edge of the cloves, the layer is no more than 4 cm.

Rape sprouts well in a garlic bed

When the bed is planted, I sprinkle the spring rapeseed thicker. I level the bed with a rake, while rape seeds are embedded in the soil. If the ground is dry, I water it.

So the bed remains until stable frosts, which come, as a rule, in mid-October. Rape emerges quickly and grows actively until the very frost, building up a fairly large mass of tops and roots. It tolerates small negative temperatures well, some plants have time to bloom.

When the rape is frozen, I cover the beds with leaf litter with a layer of up to 5 cm. On top of the leaves I put potato or tomato tops. I do this just in case - the moist foliage laid on the garden bed itself holds well, forming a dense shell.

Further to the garlic beds it is worth approaching in the spring, after the snow melts - remove the tops and put them right there in the paths. Leaves over the winter are strongly caked, forming a dense cover. No further care is required. The sheet "armor" holds moisture very well. In the past extremely dry season, during harvesting, the soil was sufficiently wet without a single irrigation. Annual weeds cannot break through the foliage. Loosening is not required. The necessary soil friability will be provided by the sand in the area of the heads. Before harvesting, all that remains is to remove the arrows. I don’t give fertilizers and dressings. Garlic has enough rapeseed mass decomposing under the mulch.

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I want to pay special attention to the planting time of winter garlic. The vast majority of authors recommend planting garlic in early October. I think that in our region, the implementation of this recommendation leads to the freezing of garlic. I plant in late August - early September. And there are no contradictions with the recommendations of scientists.

For example, here is a quote from an Omsk newspaper: “For a good overwintering, garlic must take root, but not germinate. For this, it is advisable to plant garlic 40-50 days before stable frosts. Usually we time the planting of garlic to the beginning of October."

Most likely, such a text is absolutely true for the European part of Russia. But in the south of the Omsk region, stable negative temperatures are established, as a rule, in mid-October. So consider how long the planted teeth will spend in the ground before frost - 10, maximum 20 days. But certainly not 40-50! Unrooted teeth in our 30-degree frost with a snow cover of 10 cm are doomed to death. But in local newspapers, the planting date persists - the beginning of October.

Experimenting with planting timing, planting garlic cloves at 10-day intervals from September 1st. The first plantings were the most productive. Plantings in early October, although they survived (80%) thanks to a thick layer of mulch, yielded a yield 50% lower than in early September.

Later I conducted another experiment. In early October, I planted dry teeth and teeth with 5-7 cm long roots sprouted in a damp napkin. In the second case, the yield turned out to be 50% better. The conclusion suggests itself. To determine the date of planting garlic, you should not be guided by the dates prescribed in the recommendations. For their region, everyone must calculate the landing time himself.