Seeking advice on my garlic bed.

I have a 2nd year bed planted in garlic and shallots Nov 4. It is doing very well.



My question is, should I give it a top dressing of bone meal since it has not been fed for 5 months and still needs to go for another 3 or 4? I really want some garlic bulbs.

Kay

I would certainly give it a top dressing of compost and a bit of bone meal certainly wont hurt one bit! Looks good!

camprn wrote:I would certainly give it a top dressing of compost and a bit of bone meal certainly wont hurt one bit! Looks good!

I agree with Camprn, a bit of food wouldnt hurt at all. I will be putting the 5 way compost as a side dressing on mine in a month or so.

Here in Western Oregon, a Master Gardner who writes for our local paper recommends a side dressing of bonemeal and compost on garlic in late March. We've done that last two years and have been pleased with yield. YMMV.

I have just top dressed mine with a light mulch with fish meal in it
I grow mine from fall till the following fall here in Socal so I figure it needs a few boost during the year.
I would not suggest the meal close to harvest. Garlic can be pungent enough.

Subsonic, what variety of garlic are you growing in Riverside? There are several forum members who want to grow garlic, but are nervous about how well it will do in Southern climates. Your avatar mentions "lots of sun, etc." so I thought you'd have a good source for warmer climate garlics.

tell you the truth, my first bulb stock was the type I bought at the grocery store.
this is my second year to grow garlic, in my area we get a but 11.5 inches of rain a year, most of the rest of the time it is sunny, starting in July we will get weeks that go over 100, have never seen it over 110 in my area but go 30 miles away and it will get 114 in the summer. if it hts 104 here it is blazing. and it has 4 to 5 weeks of that during July August and September. I just make sure the bubblers go off twice a day and when I get home I putter through the garden and then hose it down.
I wish I knew what type of garlic it was, but it is just the normal grocery store stuff.
We have an average of 277 sun days a year here if that helps
I have found garlic is one of the plant and forget crops, I top dress it a few times a year and pull it in the fall, next wee I replant for next year.
it is in the lily family so make sure it does not dry out and keep it from rotting from to much water and that is it.

Does it form a hard scape in spring before it bulbs up? Or is it a 'softneck' that you can harvest, dry and braid? Being not that far from Gilroy, I'd bet it's a variety called Susanville, a nice-sized, good tasting softneck. Would be interesting to see what a variety like Spanish Roja would do in your area. It's a spicy hardneck, and its scapes are good eating, if cut while they still have a bit of a curl. Then the plant goes on to produce a great salsa garlic bulb.

It comes up in October a few weeks after I plant it I have recognizable plants. no it does not have a hard neck. Gilroy is half way up the state from me.
I pull it at the end of August or early September bring it in the house, wash it off and cut the necks and lay it out on the counter for a few days ( a few days is a relative term, about 3 weeks in a meshed cage) to dry then pop a good group into the garlic bin, keep some back to replant, use some to make garlic infused olive oil and we usually give some away. It has never gone to seed on me but I understand that is when you are supposed to pull it, I pull it so I have some good warm weather so it can start and have good growth to overwinter.
I have never thought about giving advice on how to grow garlic, to me it, onions, bulb flowers and other related plants have grown like weeds where ever I have lived. I have lived in Florida Louisiana and here in California. I have fits with cucumbers, melons and lettuce, other stuff I seem to have good luck with, but then my mother half raised me in a vege garden and I do a lot of judging by sticking my finger in the soil, rubbing leaves and those old ways your mother always told you what to look for in this plant and that.
Funny thing is I was just fiddling with the garlic patch today, the stocks were firm with nice water content, I cut back the bubbler opening a bit as I had topped dressed and felt like the soil was to moist. They left a good smell on my fingers so I know bulb production is good.
Now, If you could tell me how to get a melon to actually fruit to full size, that to me would be great info because one day I am going to walk in the house with a mature watermelon I can eat.

Wish I could tell you how to grow a good watermelon, but Western Oregon just isn't a good melon-growing area. Having said that, I'm going to try another bale bed this year (6 old hay bales arranged in a rectangle, the center filled with good soil and Mel's Mix. Melon sets put inside, and covered with a kinda' hoop house. Last year's bale bed heated up real well as the bales began to rot, and the squash planted therein were wonderful! No plastic covered hoop over them, but for melons, I'm going to experiment with the plastic.

Seems like the heat of your part of the country would give you an edge in growing melons. The best melons around here come from eastern Oregon, near Hermiston, which is almost hot and dry enough to be semi desert.

Sorry - I am a little new to some of the terminology on the forum and gardening properly. Will someone explain what side and top dressing are exactly? Thanks much!

JennAndCompany wrote:Sorry - I am a little new to some of the terminology on the forum and gardening properly. Will someone explain what side and top dressing are exactly? Thanks much!

Side Dressing:

Giving crops an extra boost of fertilizer is called side-dressing. Good side-dressing helps crops grow evenly and smoothly and helps deliver better harvests. http://mason.gmu.edu/~mknicele/projects/poisonousplants/plant.html

Top Dressing (usually refers to lawns):

Top dressing the soil is a great way to give a new lawn a healthy start. When the soil is amended with a quality top dressing, seed germination rates improve and lawns grow healthier longer.
http://www.gardenguides.com/91794-top-dress-yard-grass-seed.html

In our case it would be adding on compost, whch is what is used to replentish a square after removing a plant.

@AvaDGardner - Thank you!!

Hey subsonic! Good to meet another SoCal member!

subsonic wrote:It comes up in October a few weeks after I plant it I have recognizable plants. no it does not have a hard neck. Gilroy is half way up the state from me.
I pull it at the end of August or early September bring it in the house, wash it off and cut the necks and lay it out on the counter for a few days ( a few days is a relative term, about 3 weeks in a meshed cage) to dry then pop a good group into the garlic bin, keep some back to replant, use some to make garlic infused olive oil and we usually give some away. It has never gone to seed on me but I understand that is when you are supposed to pull it, I pull it so I have some good warm weather so it can start and have good growth to overwinter.

So it takes a year to grow garlic? I think my bulbs said 8 mos. I put my bulbs in late Feb. I expect to harvest them in August or September. Then in March, I had some in the kitchen going to seed (and just bought!) so I planted them, too. Everything has green tops and looks good (to me who has never grown garlic before!).

"In mild climates, plant in January or February for harvesting in late summer or early fall."

I once had an extended conversation about raising garlic with a commercial Gilroy farmer. He said they store them in the dirt...just leave them there until they need to bring them up for shipping.

Incredibly convenient!

Ava

well maybe I am storing them for a few months in the dirt then

I just grow them that way and I get great garlic
its like bulbs, I pull them and put them in the beer fridge (35 degrees)for 3 1/2 months and replant them and I have great flowers. I tell that to friends all the time. I think they are just not motivated enough.

well I guess I could try to pull them earlier but when I pull them the skins are filled out and nothing is breaking through so I guess I am doing it right.

As I always say, I have no formal training in all this, my mother got me started as a child and I just always did it. She was doing raised beds in what she called French intensive gardening back in the 60s, in the 80s she started the square foot method. Kind of a hybrid back then because we still used the raised beds. Had compost piles before most guys knew what compost was. she would show me what plants can grow next to others, what plants discouraged insects, we would till in bags and bags of leaves into the soil every fall. raised rabbits for manure for certain crops. So if I am doing something wrong tell me, I probably could use the help.
hey, you have any luck with cucumber around here?

PS, I trieplnting some in april last year and they did not bulb out well.

What a wonderful mother you had!

If you have garlic flowers, aren't they going to seed?

Sorry...no experience with cukes. Not something I grow. Nor experience with melons...ask me about that one next fall. I planted Asian melons at the comm garden and cantaloupes on my patio. This is melon planting month for SoCal.

Ava

subsonic wrote:PS, I trieplnting some in april last year and they did not bulb out well.

I am in Riverside county and the best garlic I ever grew I planted in the fall (Nov I think) and it was stupendous in the spring. When I planted in the spring I got much smaller heads and cloves.

when did you harvest it Chopper
Like I said mine is in the ground close to 11 months but I get a great crop, but if I am wasting space a few months it would be nice to know.

I have a garlic question too and didn't want to start a new thread. I bought garlic to plant and really don't have a place to put it right now (impulse buy/just moved into new house), PLUS it is the wrong time to plant anyway. So, should I just make some great spaghetti sauce (eat the garlic) OR, should I plant it now in a random bucket of some sort. The bag has 5 heads of garlic.

Next question, for spring planted garlic, everything says the resulting garlic will be really small in the fall. So, why not let it just keep going over the winter, without harvesting in the fall? What happens in that case? Wouldn't it be like fall planting, but with a head start?

Thanks all!

Hi Peggy...did you make spaghetti yet? Garlic bread?

Each of those cloves is a plant. If you have some that are growing stems, and you have enough for dinner, you could put them in a pot in your house and see how they do. You can move them outside later (I don't know what zone you are in, or how hot it is there now).

Planting in spring and leaving storing it over the winter in the ground is not the same as planting it in the fall and haveing it grow all winter. When it has grown it's amount of time, it will stop growing.

Remember all plants want to reproduce themselves. After they flower and seed, many of them die. The edible part certainly changes flavor (for the worse).

I'm looking forward to seeing how big these garlics will be! I can see my shallots are growing...lots of leaves! The garlic do not have as many leaves sticking up.

Ava

Hahha, I am one of those hopeless people that just have to see for myself sometimes so I planted some garlic that I had sprouting in the kitchen in the garden, I don't have hopes up or anything but I will report back to tell you "the news" in the fall. If you go for it good luck!

And Ava, I probably should have made a nice spaghetti dinner!!! Here's to hope

hehehe, if nothing else it will make yummy garlic chive type greens for salad dressing and such... YUM!

AvaDGardner wrote:

JennAndCompany wrote:Sorry - I am a little new to some of the terminology on the forum and gardening properly. Will someone explain what side and top dressing are exactly? Thanks much!

Side Dressing:

Giving crops an extra boost of fertilizer is called side-dressing. Good side-dressing helps crops grow evenly and smoothly and helps deliver better harvests. http://mason.gmu.edu/~mknicele/projects/poisonousplants/plant.html

Top Dressing (usually refers to lawns):

Top dressing the soil is a great way to give a new lawn a healthy start. When the soil is amended with a quality top dressing, seed germination rates improve and lawns grow healthier longer.
http://www.gardenguides.com/91794-top-dress-yard-grass-seed.html

In our case it would be adding on compost, whch is what is used to replentish a square after removing a plant.

I have been wondering about this top dressing for as long as I've seen it mentioned in this forum. Exactly how do you add compost to already growing plants? Doesn't that cover them up and do harm? I am lost on this concept. Thanks!

Years ago I read that garlic could be planted in a child's swimming pool because they do not have deep roots. The other day I was given two pools that someone did not want and I want to try this. Has anyone done it? The pool is about 7" - 8" deep so well within the SFG 6" requirement. My concern is whether it will be enough protection from the NE cold. However, I plan to set one pool inside the other for more insulation and just plant that way. The best location for me is beside my garage, on asphalt. Will that conduct too much cold?