Growing garlic 2018

I apologise in advance for my mangled attempt of referencing in this post. I'm trying out using some referencing software and I think I've entered some info in the wrong way. Anyway I've planted out some more garlic this year and the bulbs I sourced are fantastic. I thought I'd write up a little post on garlic planting.

Common name: Garlic
Genus: Allium
Specific epithet: sativum

Description:  Garlic is a bulbous herb 60cm in height, with four to twelve leaves attached to an underground stem. Flowers are contained in an inflorescence called a spike and are greenish-white. Amazingly seeds are not usually produced in the wild but have been produced in the lab (www.kew.org, 2018).


Origin and brief history: Central Asia is considered to be the original area where garlic grew and it's said by some to have been bought to China (which is where Westerners discovered it) by the Mongolians from the Asian steppes (Salvestrin, 1984). Other historians claim that garlic did in fact originate from China itself (Petrovska and Cekovska, 2010). Ancient Egyptians used it in their cooking and fed it to their slaves and ancient Egyptian crypts contain the oldest visible inscriptions of garlic (Petrovska and Cekovska, 2010). It is mentioned in England before 1958 by Peter Martyr in his writings about the new world where he says it was used in Mexico (Salvestrin, 1984).

Growing your own garlic;

Locally grown organic garlic is superior in flavour to the commonly imported Chinese garlic you find in supermarkets however it is also significantly more expensive. As luck would have it though, garlic is dead easy to grow in Melbourne and most parts of Victoria so why not give it a go yourself?

How to source bulbs 

Basically you can use any garlic bulbs you would find at a farmers market or you can buy bulbs online through various suppliers. You want to plant out a variety that has a flavour you appreciate and source bulbs that are large as I'm guessing they probably have more energy reserves that can be utilised to produce a larger end product. This year I bought Italian purple garlic from Hopkins River Herbs which I found through farmhouse direct https://www.farmhousedirect.com.au/hopkinsriverherbs. The garlic I received tastes fantastic and was large in size so it's just what I wanted.

Soil

Well drained clay loam with a PH between 6.5 and 7 is said to be the best soil in Victoria from growing garlic (Towers, 1984). However I know lots of people that grow it in various soils. So long as it's not in extreme clay or sand and the PH is reasonable I think it will be ok.

Timing

People have all sorts of crazy ideas in regard to timing. I've heard lots of different stories such as 'plant out on mothers day and harvest on fathers day'. Another tip lots of people have given me personally is to plant out in autumn before the weather starts to cool down. The idea behind this I'm told is that the change in weather somehow assists germination and the early growth stages. Whether this is true I don't know but all the crops I've planted have turned out well using this timing.

Irrigation

My basic irrigation strategy for garlic is simply to give it some water when there hasn't been much rain. Pretty simple but it seems to work fine.

Planting method

After you've sourced your bulbs you want to break them into cloves but you don't want to plant out the cloves that in the centre of the bulb. Smaller cloves have less vigour and are better eaten than planted out. Place them in the soil tip up and base down and try to cover them with around 5cm of soil (although this is a rough measurement sometimes I've done it with less or a little more). I then water them in out of habit and that's the whole process.

Harvesting

I will cover harvesting in a later post in detail.

 That's what 1kg of Italian purple garlic from Hopkins River Herbs looks like

Over exposed pic of the separation in progress

You want to avoid those smaller cloves in the centre. They wont grow into decent bulbs

All ready to go

Make sure you plant them pointy end up

References

Petrovska, B. B. and Cekovska, S. (2010) ‘Extracts from the history and medical properties of garlic.’, Pharmacognosy reviews. Wolters Kluwer -- Medknow Publications, 4(7), pp. 106–10. doi: 10.4103/0973-7847.65321.

Salvestrin, J. (1984) ‘Review of garlic overseas and in Australia’, in Sutherland, J. (ed.) Growing Garlic The Unforgiving Crop. 1st edn. Melbourne: Department of Agriculture NSW, p. 1.

Towers, B. (1984) ‘Growing garlic in southern Victoria’, in Growing Garlic The Unforgiving Crop. Department of Agriculture NSW, p. 83.

www.kew.org (2018) Allium sativum L. | Plants of the World Online | Kew Science, Kewscience. Available at: http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:528796-1 (Accessed: 8 May 2018).

 

How I've improved the soil in my backyard veggie beds

First of all I realize it has been a while between posts (I'm not dead in case you were wondering)

When I opened up my blog a few days ago I was shocked to see the last post was in 2016! Basically I got a bit blogged out and forgot / ignored it. I'm pretty sure that I've lost all the people who used to follow my blog and that is my fault but hopefully I can get things rolling again and put down some content regularly from here on. If you're an old follower who is reading this because of some kind of alert then please come back again. Anyway I'm alive and well plus I'm going to be starting my own garden design / maintenance business very soon now which is personally very exciting (see www.aggregata.com.au for a partially finished website).

Improving the soil in my backyard veggie patch

History of the site

We purchased our land in Macedon Victoria around 10 years ago and after a while I noticed a few strange things about the soil. The block we live on was one of the most barren in the street. Unlike the other blocks which had lots of trees and plants ours was rather bare with large patches of mixed species (weedy) lawn. Through digging in the backyard I found very little top soil compared to the front which had at least 15cm and more in some places. I'm wondering whether the top soil in the back yard was scalped by a bob cat at some stage.

Soil analysis

I learnt how to complete a basic soil analysis through one of my subjects at university and I discovered the following info about the soil in the backyard;

• It had a PH level of 5 which is slightly acidic and possibly detrimental to plant growth for some species
• Using the soil texture triangle I was surprised to find the soil was in fact classified as sandy clay loam (56.52% sand, 30.43% clay and 13.04% silt)

Ah Manutec my old friend. You are so much more accurate and reliable than the $5 Bunnings PH probe.

Is it 5.5 or 5? Hard to tell from the pic but it looked more like 5.

Soil improvement last year

I dug the beds last year in preparation for spring planting. I sprayed off the turf with organic herbicide and dug in some compost. Unfortunately I didn't attempt to rectify the PH. Plant growth was not great last season.

Bed #1 with last spring / summers pathetic left overs.

Bed #2 which I cleared out a few weeks back.

My raised bed. You can see the difference. So much growth. On a side note organic snail bait doesn't work. I caught the little buggers munching on my bok choy it a few nights ago. I'll have to try other methods as I don't really want to go back to using Baysol snail pellets.

Overhaul

After pulling the old veggies out I dug in roughly half a m2 of five ways soil mix then limed the

Although last years crop wasn't very good I was pleased to see the soil had improved structure wise. It felt nice and loose when digging it over and it had a nice amount of moisture. The soil definitely was less hard packed. I applied lime at the rate of 100g per m2 to try and change the PH back to a more neutral level. I'll do another PH test soon to see if it worked. I then watered the lime in and mulched over with old straw from my chicken coop that I removed a few weeks back. The plan for the beds are to plant out 1kg of garlic that is arriving in the mail soon.

There's nothing like the feeling (and smell) of driving a ute with one m2 of 5 ways mix on the back.

Look at that pristine bed all ready to go and not a weed in site. It won't stay that way for long :)

I always water down mulch. Don't know if it really helps it settle and become wind resistant but that's the idea.

Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show. Building Melbourne Uni's exhibit.

MIFGS Pre Release!

After years of blogging reviews of the Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (well except for last year when I went but was too lazy to write a review) I finally got my first opportunity to be involved with one of the exhibits. To be truthful it was a voluntary position with my only 'payment' being some show tickets to get in once it is open.

The exhibit I was working on was the University of Melbourne's horticulture display which celebrated 125 years of continual horticultural training at the Burnley campus. The fact that the Burnley campus has been in operation for that long is quite an achievement and no other institution in the world has provided continuous horticultural training for that length of time.

The display itself consisted of a shipping container we adapted with a green roof and green wall panels. The scaffolding outside the container was converted into a hanging garden with waxed paper cones used as plant containers. Each cone has a horticultural icon and a brief description of their achievements and influence on horticulture.

It was a fun but exhausting day and I left feeling chuffed that I had contributed something to the show which I have gone to and admired for years. By the end of it all I was so tired I only took a brief walk around to see the rest of the exhibits. I left at 3.30pm and some of the other sites looked like they still had lots to do considering the opening is tomorrow. I will visit the show proper this week and write up a review of some of the displays next week. Right now though I think it's time for a cup of tea and a spell on the couch :)

A view from the south side of the exhibition building.

On top of the container planting organising the green roof

A view from the top of the container at our next door neighbours exhibit

Another picture taken from the top of the container showing the back side of the garden exhibits getting ready to be judged

Nick organising a green wall panel

 Those damned cones took all day to hang up and fill with plants

Jasmine plants ready to get transferred to the roof

Jasmonified green roof

More cones (see if you can spot Megan Backhouse)

Teeny weeny plants in teeny weeny test tubes

Test tube plant

 

 Almost done for the day

 More cones

Some old fashioned plant biology lab gear in the container (and also a portable air conditioner which was heaven to stand in front of)

One of our green wall panels filled with succulents

 Why did I take so many pictures of cones?

Ah now for the important pictures. Ben on the left and me on the right.

All the crew from Burnley at the end of the day

Visiting the Forest Glade Gardens on Mount Macedon in summer

Forest Glade Gardens in summer 2014

Towards the end of last summer I took some visitors from England up to Mount Macedon to view a garden. I remember looking on the open gardens website and seeing that nothing was on offer up there on that particular weekend. That being the case I knew that there are always a few gardens that are open for viewing as these particular ones are open every weekend. We decided to visit Forest Glade. I didn't know anything about Forest Glade and for some stupid reason thought that because the garden was open all the time and not part of the open garden scheme openings that it would be a bit sub standard. How wrong I was. Forest Glade is a huge garden (14 acres) and has 4 different areas. Those areas are an English garden, a woodland garden, a Japanese garden and a cool fern gully. The gardens were very well maintained and unbelievably green considering I was there in the middle of a really hot spell (I'm pretty sure this was only a week after we had that run of 40+ Celsius days). The gardens also have lots of sculptures placed here and there. One of the great things about living in Macedon how the trees colour up so vibrantly during Autumn so I'm definitely going back there in a few weeks.

This is the first view you experience upon entering the gardens. Believe me the shade was a godsend on the 30+ Celsius day I was there.

I love these pavilions (there must be a more accurate word for them). 

One of many sculptures throughout the gardens. This one is near the front.

Top view of the topiary area.

Arum lillies growing in a cascading water feature at the top of the topiary garden. 

So much box hedge. These big gardens on the Mountains are full of hedging.

Topiary swan

Bear and giraffe all neatly clipped

The next 4 pictures are of spectacular dahlias that were growing in a herbaceous bed. They are such showy flowers. I really need to get some for my garden at home.

The remainder of the photographs are of the Japanese garden. This really was an impressive part of the gardens. Its probably has to be the largest section of Japanese garden I have seen in Victoria to this day.

Wow look at that circular passageway.

Pond area complete with stepping stones and massive goldfish.

This small path was really cute. It wasn't anywhere near big enough for any person to walk though. I'm guessing it was a water feature as it runs into the pond area.

Bonsai house.