Get yer garlic in!

I love garlic. I sometimes wonder if there's an Italian bunny in my (of course enormous) family tree.

Garlic is easy to grow, but it does have a couple of foibles. It doesn't like wet feet (who does?) and it likes a nip or two (of frost, that is). It thrives in well-drained, well-fed (but not too rich) soil, with a good dose of winter freeze - and sun - thrown in.

It's pretty easy to remember the basics - tradition has it that you plant on the shortest day, and harvest on the longest. That's because the bulb development of garlic is triggered by the length of the daylight hours. Personally, I harvest my garlic a bit after midsummer as I think it benefits from a bit longer in the soil in my garden conditions, particularly if I'm going to store it.

In reality you can plant garlic anything up to a couple of months either side of midwinter - but you probably should get your garlic-planting skates on soon.

So, first catch your garlic! It's best to buy seed garlic or organic garlic from a local supplier. Imported garlic, which is most of the stuff you'll see in the supermarket, is usually treated to stop it from sprouting - so it's not much use if you want to grow it. Break your bulb into cloves, and select the nicest, biggest, fattest cloves from around the outside of the bulb - these will give you your best, healthiest plants. (Don't waste the rest - you can of course cook with those!)

Plant the cloves into your prepared beds, pointy end up, at about a finger's depth and 20-30cm apart. Then wait! My first lot, planted in May, has been up for a couple of weeks now:

I've got some New Zealand purple garlic in (my favourite) and, for the first time, some enormous cloves of mild elephant garlic (which is actually more closely related to leeks than garlic - go figure). I'm very excited about them!

You can consume garlic as "wet garlic" once the bulbs develop but before the outer layers dry out and become papery. It's gorgeous roasted whole. (At this end of the world that's around late November to early December.) If you want to store them you'll need to leave them be until after Christmas (I usually wait for some nice dry weather in mid January) and then lift them gently (don't just pull the top, it'll probably break off!) and leave them to dry in the sun for a few hours. Clean them up by gently rubbing off the outer layer.

Then you can eat them, store them, save some to replant next winter or even plait them! Just try not to breathe on anyone after a garlic-fest. :-)