divaqs's Blog
divaqs's posts about: garlic
May 22, 2007 | 9:19 AM PST
Tags: succession planting , garlic , edamame , beans , soil fertility , intensive gardening
I’ve read books and information on intensive gardening techniques. Many talk about succession planting, in which you grow one thing after another as a way to increase the productivity of your garden through utilizing that space more efficiently over a season by not letting the space stand idle.
Succession planting is a great idea and something I sometimes do, though personally I try to follow something a little more intensive, which I believe further increases my yield. I try to overlap my plantings. So, while some of my garden finishes their season I have other garden plants sprouting and getting ready to fill in to take their place.
You can see an example of this in this picture I took this weekend.
In the picture you can see garlic plants that I overwintered, which will be ready to harvest near the start of June. A couple of weeks ago I planted edamame beans interlaced in-between the garlic. The edamame beans are still small sprouts. By the time I harvest the garlic, the beans will be medium sized plants.
By overlapping my plantings I don’t feel like I impair my plants growth since the initial stages of growth of the new plants have very little impact on the previous plants.
The challenge with using overlapping succession planting as part of intensive gardening is the strain it puts on the garden fertility and difficulty in amending the soil. In true sequential succession planting it is easy to amend the soil in-between plantings with compost or some sort of fertilizer, however if there are always plants present in that location, you don’t want to be dumping compost on top of them. I assure you that lettuce and compost don’t make for good salads.
I’ve come up with a couple of solutions to the challenge of maintaining or restoring soil fertility. The first one being that I tend to use some sort of beans as one of my overlapping plantings, since they are nitrogen fixing and increase the fertility of the garden soil for the next plants. In the picture and example above, the edamame beans are a kind of sweet soybean, which have the nitrogen fixing quality to them. I also tend to stop overlapping my plantings for at least one harvest of the year, so I can top dress with compost before continuing. Due to plants being harvested at different times, I have to do this in a patchwork way in my garden. Winter tends to be the best time for me to do this.
From an aesthetics perspective, I think something growing in my garden is a much more pleasing sight than empty areas of dirt, so if I can keep things visibly present in my garden I feel my garden is more beautiful and more of a personal delight.
I have probably more than 1000 square feet of vegetable and herb garden space, so it is a real challenge for me to maintain truly intensive and overlapping planting regimes throughout my garden, but it is something I continue to work on and keep in mind.
May 21, 2007 | 9:01 AM PST
Tags: Elephant Garlic , Allium Ampeloprasum , garlic , winter garden
As part of my attempts of doing year round gardening, I over-winter garlic and elephant garlic. Personally, I prefer elephant garlic (Allium Ampeloprasum) more than normal garlic. My reasons being that I find the elephant garlic’s milder and slightly sweeter taste and larger size of cloves to be better for roasting. Don’t get me wrong, I like garlic and use it all the time in my cooking, but when it comes to roasting garlic with some pot roast or a tinfoil dinner, a clove of elephant garlic is best. One of my single cloves of elephant garlic is often as big as or even bigger than a complete bulb of normal garlic.
Here is a picture from a couple of weeks ago of some I have growing in my garden.
This picture is a southern facing hill that I terraced into rows of garden beds. I use boards as movable walkways that I can change to different levels from year to year as part of my plant rotation.
Elephant garlic is actually not real garlic, but more closely related to leaks. I believe it gets its name from the size of the bulbs, which I would say are between a baseball and a softball in size in my garden, which look a lot like giant garlic bulbs and have a somewhat similar taste.
Three years ago I purchased elephant garlic from a seed catalog and for the first time planted it in my garden in the fall. Since then I have saved the best cloves and replanted in the fall from that summer’s cloves. Each year I have planted a little more. This year I think I might have more than I can use in a year.
I’ve read that some people use the young unopened flowering heads as a vegetable. I am considering trying this in a stir-fry and seeing how my kids react.
The plant, if left alone, will spread into a clump with many flowering heads. These can be left in flower gardens to discourage pests, though the plants have always looked kind of like corn stalks to me, which I’ve never thought very ornamental.
In this picture you can get a sense of the difference of size of normal garlic plants to elephant garlic plants.
The sad looking plants in the foreground are an early variant of garlic called Chinese pink garlic, which are full size and will be ready to harvest soon. My dog has been laying among them, which resulted in the sad condition you see them in.
The next row up is my elephant garlic. They are starting to form flower heads and put on the last of their height. I’ve seen these plants get as much as 4 feet in height.
Behind my elephant garlic is asparagus, which is beginning to show its natural fern form.
