Growing Winter Garlic Near St. Petersburg

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

In the magazine "Flora Price" # 3 for this year, I talked about the spring cultivation of winter garlic in extreme conditions, when the autumn plantings got wet and died. In this case, I plant the garlic as early as possible in the spring. But under normal conditions, of course, winter garlic is planted in the soil in the fall.

I will tell you about my many years of experience in growing sustainable crops of winter garlic in a garden plot near Vyborg.

× Gardener's handbook Plant nurseries Stores of goods for summer cottages Landscape design studios

If you lose, you will not find

Until recently, any gardener and gardener could not imagine their beds without winter garlic. But lately, this garlic has become less and less frequent on the plots. Many people think this way: "Let's not bother with it, it's easier to buy." They forgot that they need fresh garlic for salads in June, not to mention the numerous preparations for the winter in August and September. We begin to cook lightly salted cucumbers in June, but what about without garlic? The dacha is far away, you can't go to town for every bulb. And they start asking me for arrows of garlic or at least a couple of cloves of spring garlic.

As a result of this attitude towards this valuable crop, many gardeners have lost their planting material, the garlic that has been getting used to their land for years. As a result, last autumn, I saw an incredible picture: one onion of winter garlic cost 25 rubles, and no one sold spring garlic at all - they were exhausted.

Who else has not asked me for garlic for planting! It turned out that I distributed almost a quarter of my harvest. In one club, a harvest festival was held, at the stands of which I exhibited winter and spring garlic (it turned out to be very large last season), onions - turnip and sets of Stuttgarter Riesen and Danilovsky varieties, leeks. Everything left the stands, only two bulbs of winter garlic remained. I understand that the gardeners could not find the garlic to plant and took mine. And this is not surprising. My dacha neighbors live in Vyborg. There, last autumn, garlic for planting cost 300 rubles per kilogram. But who knows: where is he from? Will it take root? Therefore, to everyone who does not know how to grow their own garlic, I will tell you how I do it.

Not all gardeners get garlic. There are many reasons for this, but the main one is the lack of desire to approach it as a culture that requires not only knowledge, but also special attention to agricultural technology. I have been in contact with gardeners working in the Leningrad land for over 20 years. And I often heard such statements: where, they say, you stick a clove of garlic, it grows good. However, for some reason, by the New Year, the bulbs dried out, and they had to buy garlic. Or they said: before the garlic was good, but then suddenly in the spring only a few pieces rose. And they began to blame the weather, shrews and moles for everything.

In fact, their garlic is "tired" of multiplying vegetatively for decades. He has accumulated diseases, and pests attack weak garlic. It is difficult to observe crop rotation on a small piece of land. But if you follow science, then you need to return it to its original place in 5-6 years, but gardeners plant there in a year or two. I also fail to withstand a period of 5-6 years, I have to plant again on the same bed in four years on the fifth - there is no free land.

Gardeners often ask me to tell you: how do I manage to get a good harvest of garlic in these conditions, which is stored normally? I come to clubs, tell stories, show visual aids - different bulbs - bulbs, one-tooth, four-tooth, 6-7-teeth. Large onions of 6-7 cloves are already marketable garlic, I use it for harvesting, for food in winter.

Harvest any year

Before proceeding with the presentation of my agricultural technology, I want to say a little about the weather, which gardeners and gardeners complain about all the time.

Take, for example, the last three years: 2008 - the year of Jupiter - is a fertile time for vegetables, berries, apple trees, grapes, etc. Moderately warm, it rained - this is the favorable weather for vegetables and flowers. Of course, very few people managed to sunbathe. In the spring there was not even frost, and my apple trees were bursting with fruits, thorns and cherry plums were born. The gardeners also called the summer rainy, but the harvest was incredible.

2009 is the year of Mars. At first the spring was warm and active, but there were frosts. Summer turned out to be unstable - sometimes dry, then rains. Complaints started again - everything was flooded, you won’t get warm, you don’t sunbathe. But we are the owners of the land, the nurse, we need to get a good harvest, and not just sunbathe.

For vegetables, flowers, grapes, berries, that year again turned out to be favorable. We filled the beds according to all the rules, made drainage, if necessary, dug grooves. As a result, the rain is watered, the soil is warm - the plants are good, just know - have time to loosen. I remember that the Romanovs gardeners wrote an article in our magazine: "Summer has passed, there was no summer." But they had a harvest, and a splendid harvest. During that season, representatives of the authorities, various gardening organizations, television men, journalists, gardeners from different places came to them. And everyone was surprised and admired. And there was something. After all, melons, and watermelons, and tomatoes, and peppers, and cucumbers, and apples, and flowers have grown and ripened in them … But the Romanov family made land in the swamp, saturating it with organic matter for years. They are well aware of the effect of a warm bed. So they have results, and in any season.

All winter in the clubs I was overwhelmed with questions by gardeners: "When will we warm ourselves?"

I answered them all: "Next summer." I knew this would be the year of the Sun. And, indeed, not only warmed up, but did not protrude from the houses during the day. And again complaints: "It's such a heat, everything is dry." But the weather has nothing to do with it. It was necessary to navigate already in the spring, i.e. early to close the moisture in the beds, to loosen the berries earlier than usual, and in the fall to add more plant waste to the soil and close up. It was important to have time for sowing and planting in moist soil, i.e. do not delay this work. If these rules are observed, the plants have time to take root, and if the summer in the year of the Sun is dry, then such plants are no longer afraid. Of course, watering will also have to be done, especially for those with sandy soils.

And again there were many complaints, they say, the summer is abnormal, the harvest was not harvested. But I have a record of the weather that summer. For example, on June 24 - the tops of the potatoes are large (the tubers were planted on May 31), but every day the rains did not allow them to climb into the garden to huddle the plantings. I had to make grooves and drain the water. The planting of the Elizaveta variety - three rows of eight nests in a row - had to be eliminated: there was water and the tubers began to rot. So all the vegetables, berries, flowers were saturated with water, and since their root system was powerful by that time, the heat that came later was not terrible for them.

I had a very big harvest of the 2010 season - vegetables, fruits and flowers were a success. In the year of the Sun, the potato harvest is average. In some gardeners, the tubers grew small, but there were many of them in the nest, and in some they were very large, but there were few of them in the nest. I did not expect a different picture this year, so I calmly reacted to it. For example, I have new varieties of potatoes Aurora, Radonezh, Ladoga, I have been growing them for three years. They had very large tubers, but 6-7 pieces per nest. I have been growing varieties Naiad and Vdohnovenie for five years already. Their tubers are not entirely small, but they turned out to be much smaller than in previous years. But there were 13-15 of them in the nest. Maybe in this case, a lot depends on the variety, on its fatigue on the same land. As a result, we reaped a good harvest, but it was less than in the previous two years. I noticed long ago that those gardeners who study, go to clubs, usually do not refer to the weather.

That is why to the constant complaints of gardeners that their winter garlic is not stored for a long time - it dries up, I answer: "Grow both winter and spring garlic." A lot of winter crops are used for harvesting in autumn, and in winter and until spring, spring garlic can be consumed. Then they begin to complain that the spring they turn out to be small. And for some reason he is not small for me.

I did not pick winter garlic for my plot and the peculiarities of our climate right away. The situation with garlic varieties for our region is awful. The fact is that our climatic zone is not suitable for the industrial cultivation of garlic, so no one really deals with varieties for the North-West. I had to look closely at the garlic for years, find out what it needs, what to do, so that it could be stored until the next harvest.

Both winter garlic and spring garlic suffer not only from pests and diseases, but also from physiological disorders.

× Notice board Kittens for sale Puppies for sale Horses for sale

Why do garlic leaves turn yellow?

There may be several reasons:

a) cold weather in spring; at low soil temperatures, the roots "do not work", and plants take food from their own leaves. Much depends on the variety here. Two varieties grow on one ridge, in one in spring the leaves turn yellow, and in the other they are green.

b)violation of water balance - lack or excess of moisture. It can be very dry or damp in autumn or spring. For example, I somehow decided to check: how will irrigation affect the plants? I planted garlic on two ridges in different parts of the garden. One was watered according to the standard until July 15, and the other was never watered. As always, gardeners came to my site and compared their plantings with mine. And they were disappointed that I had garlic plants with yellowed lower leaves on my ridge, and they, as they said, had a “green wall”. I take them to the other end of the garden and show them the ridge that I watered - there is the same "green wall". But I don't need this, because our summer is very short, and plants with too green leaves will not have time to ripen until the end of summer, which means that such garlic will be poorly stored. This garlic is largebeautiful I use in the fall in blanks. Therefore, I do not water the winter garlic, but I water the spring garlic, but only in exceptional cases. But in the spring, after the snow melts, I immediately loosen the compacted soil in the garden with winter garlic.

c) you have acidic soil, so a month before planting it must be calcified.

d) the landing time affects. I can judge this from my own experience. I planted one bed of garlic at the very beginning of September, and another in October, as many gardeners do. I was wondering: how will garlic behave? As a result, the garlic of the September planting began to turn yellow almost a month earlier, and the October garlic was green. September earlier threw out arrows, i.e. ripe earlier. And it was stored better, because it had time to mature.

e) diseases and pests: fusarium, white rot, mosaic, rust, tobacco thrips, onion fly, lurker.

Whitening of leaf tips

There are several reasons: lack of copper, potassium, nitrogen, acidic soil, the effect of frost.

If the garlic dries out before the New Year

Diseases, pests affect here. Or it hasn't really matured. Not ripe, which means it was planted late, there was little sun, a lot of organic matter, the ridge is located in a low place, where there is a lot of moisture and little air. In such a place, the ridges should be made high and not wide, do not water the plantings. In the press, you can find recommendations: watering until July 15. And you should be guided by your site, because everyone has their own situation, for example, in my garden, garlic does not need to be watered, and who has sandy soil, then, of course, it is necessary to water.

The storage temperature of garlic is -1 ° C … 0 ° C … + 1 ° C, at this temperature pests and diseases freeze. I cannot provide such storage conditions for the harvest, so the garlic lies on the kitchen floor in boxes and nets.

Thickening on the arrowhead of garlic

On the arrow of winter garlic, a thickening sometimes occurs near the leaves, very large bulbs without flowers are formed there. The impression is that the inside turned out to be an onion. The reason for this is that a southern variety was planted, or maybe a short mild winter affected: in autumn the temperature remains at + 4 ° C for a long time, severe drought after planting, insufficient vernalization period in case of planting winter garlic in spring. For these reasons, the flower arrow is weakened, its height is only 10-15-20 cm, and not 100-150 cm as usual.