Finally some green: garlic
I have an alternate title for today's short post: "garlic is easy!" In the end though I went with the "green" title, as there is so much brown around that any hint of the verdant must be celebrated.
So a quick look at my garlic, which although planted in late autumn has only recently started growing.
In the previous two mild winters the garlic leaves emerged very early, but this year the extreme cold held them back; put them into what is probably closer to a normal schedule.
If you haven't grown garlic before and it's something that you want to try (and enjoy cooking with), you should know that this is one of the easiest, almost care-free things I grow. Sure they need a bit of decent soil, plenty of sunlight, water, but other than that you can just forget about them.
As evidenced by these two heads that I apparently missed harvesting last year:
I don't expect these to produce anything worth saving, but I'll leave them alone to see what happens. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.
Here's something even more surprising:
Apparently I dropped one of the heads that I harvested over here, and it hid from me. Being on top of the soil didn't stop it though, as it's happily growing away. I'll probably cover it up with compost or soil, as I don't think it will form a head above ground, but it sure was eager to get growing!
I'm hoping that's the feeling that most of my plants have right now too.
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If there aren't too many cloves in one spot, they can still turn into decent sized bulbs. It's only when they really get crammed which is when they start getting tiny.
Steve: since those are whole heads that stayed in the ground, I suspect they're about as crammed together as possible. :)
As long as the greens aren't shading each other out and they can grow out into a certain direction away from the other forming bulbs, they will still reach a formidable size, sometimes even as big as single planted cloves. If you get a bulb of around 14 big cloves together, that's a different story.