Homeschool Garden Club - Garlic
Home-grown garlic takes up little space and requires hardly any effort to get a good crop. It’s a good crop to grow as part of the Homeschool Garden Club, as garlic is easy to grow, and the cloves are the perfect size to be planted if you have small hands.
Please don't be tempted to use garlic from the supermarket, jsut like potatoes we need to put virus free varieties in to the ground. A lot of our supermarket garlic is flown in from over seas and we need garlic that has been especially grown for our climate.
There are two types of garlic to grow: softneck garlic and hardneck garlic.
Softneck garlic is easier to grow and stores well
Hardneck garlic, while less hardy and not as long-lasting, it has the best flavour.
There’s also elephant garlic, which bears giant, mild-flavoured bulbs, which you can grow for a lighter garlic flavour. We can have a competition to see who can grow the biggest elephant.
The 5 I have picked for the garden club to plant this week are:
'Albigensian Wight'– a heavy cropping, soft-neck variety with large bulbs
Blanco Veneto' (‘Venetian Wight’) – forms large bulbs with a strong flavour
'Early Purple Wight" – mild, purple-tinged bulbs
'Iberian Wight'– produces large bulbs with plump cloves, good to plait
‘Solent Wight’– small bulbs with a strong flavour
we are going to grow them in lines, with labels, in a warm sunny spot that has been fertile before being dug over. We are having a session on garlic before we break up for the autumn half term. One they are in we will take turns to keep weed free and watered if dry. This crop will then be ready to harvest before we break up for the summer holidays next July.
You can buy garlic for both spring and autumn planting. However, it’s best to plant garlic in autumn, as the cloves need a period of cold weather to develop into bulbs. Aim to have your garlic in this week or get it done during the half term.
To plant garlic, split the bulbs into individual cloves and plant them with the pointed end upwards. Take care not to damage the cloves when separating them. Space them about 18cm apart and plant at twice their own depth.
