I pulled the garlic in late June, as rather stupidly, I had forgotten that using the sprinkler to water the patch (it’s very hot here at the moment and hand watering wasn’t cutting the mustard, the ground needs a good daily soak to keep the plants happy) meant I was also watering my garlic, which I had left to start drying out in the ground.
As a result, rust was just beginning show, it’s very mild and I know from last year that it wont effect the crop and it’s long-term keeping but it made sense to get the crop out of the ground and to remove any leaves badly affected before leaving the bulbs to dry in a sunny spot.
I’ve just checked back in the blog but it appears I never wrote down the garlic variety I bought from The Garlic Farm last Autumn, I’m pretty sure it’ll be Solent Wight or the usual Albigensian….I have feeling Albigensian. I was worried that the mild winter might have stopped the growing bulbs from forming cloves, but it appears not to have.
I planted much less than I normally do, I bought a bag of four large bulbs (I’ve struggled in the past to find places to put all the cloves and I’ve ended up growing them in all available spaces, including in the flower borders) and they were also planted closer together, but I was much more diligent about watering and feeding the crop. In return I have nice, uniformly large bulbs, not enough of them to see me through the entire year (once these are used up, it’ll be the first time in years that I have bought garlic) but I think I’ll stick with these smaller quantities, going forward.
They have been drying for some weeks and yesterday I plaited them up. I good few were left loose in a big bowl as they need using first (the bulbs have split as they dried, offering the cloves less protection in the long run)
and a few were used green, as they are on the edge of beginning to rot, from sitting in the wet soil.
I have to do some general catch-up posts for this blog, it’s been hideously hot out in the garden so I’m really just tending to the basics, but we’re finally eating quite a bit of produce so I’ll try to write a few posts in coming weeks, and get back into the swing of regular blogging.
Rock Cottage Year 
