Bust germs, repel vampires
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 1 » The goods » Bust germs, repel vampiresPlant garlic on the shortest day of the year (June 21) and it will be ready to harvest on the longest (December 21-ish)
While many of us are coughing and spluttering with winter lurgies, it’s appropriate that one of the vegetable world’s major germ-busters is getting ready to go into the ground. At a shop price of around $25/kg for organic garlic, there has got to some space for the ‘stinking rose’ in your plot.
Garlic is comparatively easy to grow and extremely rewarding to harvest. You can even cultivate it in pots, containers and window boxes so long as you use moisture-retentive, free-draining compost.
Garlic loves an open, sunny position with light soil. If yours tends to be on the heavy side then you can always plant in ridges (like you would potatoes) or raised beds, to ensure good drainage and soil that is deep enough to lure hungry roots deep into the ground. Ideally, soil should have been previously composted (this means used for a different crop harvested earlier in the year), or at least deeply dug through a couple of weeks before planting and enriched with a little well-rotted compost (fresh compost is a no-no).
Buy the firmest and fattest cloves you can find; look for guaranteed NZ-grown and organic cloves — imported garlic may have been treated to stop sprouting — or seek out reputable suppliers of seed garlic. All being well, these should produce a great crop in six months’ time.
If you’re keen to keep pests and diseases at bay then soak your individual cloves (separated from the fat fists) in a bucket of water containing a heaped tablespoon of baking powder and some liquid seaweed. This protects against fungal attack and gives the cloves a bit of extra go. Cloves should stay in the solution for around 12 hours, or until their papery skins become loosened. Peel the cloves before planting, as the skins can harbour fungal spores and pest eggs.
In our garden, the whole family gets involved and we take it in turns to gently push the cloves into the soil — fat end down, pointy end up. We’re in a warm area, so our cloves go in about 5cm deep and 10cm apart, with rows 20cm wide. If you’re in cooler or wetter climes then you can go deeper — around 10cm from tip of clove to soil surface — as long as the clove sits above the garden’s general water level. It helps if you put a thick layer of mulch over your planted garlic to insulate the cloves against frost.
Garlic is a great companion plant, thanks to its natural fungicidal and pesticidal properties. It’s useful when fighting blackspot in roses as well as planted alongside strawberries and silver beet, lettuces and cabbages. Garlic and legumes (peas and beans) don’t grow well together. You may also like to experiment using garlic oil to deter snails and slugs — research has shown that it kicks slimy butt.
Notes for now
- If your garden gets the winter freezes then bung a tennis ball into small ponds or water features, to prevent expanding ice causing cracks in concrete surrounds.
- Rhubarb should now be mulched heavily with a good thick layer of well-rotted compost. If the plant is getting big and new leaves have stopped growing from the centre, now’s the time to lift the dormant crown (the part the leaves are growing from) and divide with a spade or knife. Each divided piece wants to be about 10cm wide, with loads of fibrous roots and at least one bud. Make some new friends in the neighbourhood as you give the other chunks away.
- Tidy up your herbaceous perennials — campanulas, hardy geraniums, cornflowers and the like — by laying dead foliage over the crowns to protect them in colder areas. Where frost is not so much of an issue, cut down untidy stems to the base of the plant and chuck them into your compost heap.
- I like to leave seed pods standing in the garden through the winter months for birds and as general decoration — things like sedum and achillea heads can look particularly amazing laced with frost.
