You may remember that when we moved into the house we only had a very short amount of time before we went away on holidays. In that time, I quickly threw some garlic cloves into the ground, in the hope that I could grow something, at least, in my first few months here. Well, the garlic never really looked so healthy, the shoots were spindly and seemed to go brown and fall over very early.
Anyway, I took the lead from my wonderful Italian neighbours and decided it was time to harvest. The sight of bunches of big, fat garlic bulbs in their shed made me extremely envious. Especially when I dug mine up on the weekend and all I got was this:
The bulbs are so underdeveloped they grew as a single clove. But still, it's 50 cloves of garlic I won't be buying from the supermarket, shipped in from Chile or China, bleached and sprayed with fungicide!!
Back to my Italian neighbours... they knew exactly what the problem was. I planted them at the end of May... apparently I should have planted them in March. So next year, they promise to tell me exactly when I have to plant.
Garlic is a wonderful thing to plant, even for someone who doesn't like gardening or have time to garden. You put it in the ground and six months later dig it up and hang it to dry. And then have it on hand for cooking. The perfect low-maintenance crop, that grows quite well in our sandy Perth soils and tastes so much better than that stuff in the supermarket.
I'd saved the garlic from my previous garden, where I grew so much, I gave jars of it away as Christmas gifts. Obviously none of my friends will be getting home-grown garlic for Christmas this year!
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