Tuesday, January 01, 2008

Happy New Garlic

and Happy New Year too.

There's something symbolic about planting something on New Year's Day, especially if it's garlic which needs a cold period to perform properly (today's test - give me the proper name for that cold period. Marks out of 10 for prompt response and bonus points for spelling it correctly).






I planted 70 cloves of various garlics from The Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight http://www.thegarlicfarm.co.uk/ and 4 cloves of elephant garlic. Last year's garlic was very poor so I'm looking forward to a better crop from better stock - some of the cloves are huge.

Then came home and had a heart-starter (double espresso & a shot of Calvados). Yummy.

This morning we went to see The Golden Compass, with lots of armoured bears on Svalbard. I was going to make a cheap crack about "Not much gardening on Svalbard", but have a look at this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Global_Seed_Vault


Impressive.

Best wishes for a good year

3 comments:

kethry said...

"low temperature need" to counter dormancy that sets in when garlic has spent time at temperatures between 20 and 25*C. then when the temperatures rise/days lengthen again, the garlic starts growing more quickly than if it hadn't spent the time at the lower temperature.

No, i'm not that good - i just got curious about your question so i went to look it up :)

gotta love the 'net.

keth
xx

Gordon Mason said...

Yep, that's about it, and it needs the cold in order to 'bulb up'

lilymarlene said...

I bought one of those garlic packs from the Garlic Farm (in person, it's just down the road) and opened it to have a read. I got called away to the phone and when I got back the dogs had turfed the whole lot out. The garlic bulbs were decimated, and out of the identifying paper bags....so I didn't know which variety was which....! I planted what was left and had a good crop of anonymous garlic.
Moral....beware of dogs when opening garlic grow packs!