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Post by pepperhead212 on Jul 10, 2017 23:05:45 GMT -5
On 7-2 I harvested half of my garlic, and the rest on 7-10, as those two varieties were still mostly green on 7-02. The Russian Red still only had one or two brown leaves, so could have stayed in another week, but I wanted to get it done with! The Estonian Red and Georgian Fire were the first ones harvested, and I was surprised I got as many as I did with the ER, as they were hit hardest by those aphids under that cover I put over everything, to prevent the allium leaf miner. Considering how bad those were, I'm pleased to have gotten 96 heads out of the 130 or so I planted. I'll be set for a while! Here are the photos. Georgian, largest on average: DSCF0176 by pepperhead212, on Flickr Estonian red: DSCF0174 by pepperhead212, on Flickr Music: DSCF0200 by pepperhead212, on Flickr Russian Red, from just 1/4 lb: DSCF0201 by pepperhead212, on Flickr
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Post by meandtk on Jul 11, 2017 13:44:42 GMT -5
Nice!
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Post by paquebot on Jul 11, 2017 22:46:00 GMT -5
Estonian Red should have been larger than Georgian. Two people introduced that one at the same time about 15 years ago. I was one of them. One source was only through SSE while mine went out via We Grow Garlic. One thing though, ours made bulbs, not heads!
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by pepperhead212 on Jul 12, 2017 10:10:23 GMT -5
paquebot Estonian red is usually my largest, but I had a severe aphid infestation on my garlic this year. This is something that has never happened with my garlic, but this year I had to cover it, to protect from allium leaf miners. When I uncovered it, the Estonian reds were the worst hit - seems like they started from the front and worked toward the back. I considered myself lucky to get anything from those ERs, as they were covered with black aphids. I sprayed with pyrethrins - something I only do when something really bad happens like this - and the garlic recovered, but the ERs were smaller than normal.
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Post by daylilydude on Jul 12, 2017 17:00:36 GMT -5
I love the smell of garlic... I'm hoping that is what heaven smells like...
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Post by paquebot on Jul 12, 2017 20:07:25 GMT -5
pepperhead212,that would explain why your Estonian Red was not up to standard. I seem to have been fortunate when it comes to garlic diseases and bugs. I have been growing garlic in the same garden before half of the present population of the world was born. First planted what was to become Martin's on 28 April, 1983. Estonian Red has an interesting background. Nobody knows its real name. It's source was actually Denmark and was known as Red Estonian with a claim to being the largest grown in that country. That is what it was when I got bulbils from Denmark. About same time, an SSE member brought some back and it also was Red Estonian. Since there is a breed of cattle called Red Estonian, we all agreed that the garlic should be Estonian Red. Nobody has found any reason to dispute it. Martin Note to DLD. Is it possible for you to pull my avatar over here from HF? Don't know why I can't get it up here as it was no problem in the other Proboards forums. The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by pepperhead212 on Jul 12, 2017 21:11:40 GMT -5
From what I've heard, paquebot, you're not in the zone that the allium leaf miner is in, so far. It's in the NE, and started in Lancaster, PA, in 2016, spreading in all directions. Until these aphids appeared, under the cover, I never had a problem at all with garlic. But I should have foreseen this, as I cover some peppers to prevent pepper maggots (also caused by a fly, that comes in and lays eggs), and had a severe black aphid infestation one year. So now, I dust with banana peel powder (might be a myth, but I do eat a lot of bananas!), and DE when I first cover the plants, and also dump some ladybugs under the cover, a few times each season. I'll have to do this with garlic, from now on. Interesting info on the ER! I love that variety, due to the huge cloves, and great flavor. I like large varieties, as I cook a lot calling for a large number of cloves, and one of those equals 3 or 4! Only drawback is that it doesn't store as long as some of my others, but I just use it first, so no big problem.
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Post by paquebot on Jul 13, 2017 23:08:07 GMT -5
If one wants garlic from digging to digging, need to plant some softnecks, too. They are the only ones that will last a year. I've also had some porcelain last a year. I did throw out some small Martin's a few days ago and some cloves would have been salvageable. But no sense of fooling around with them when I was going to dig today.
Second year in a row with too much June rain and harvest reflected it. A third had bulb skins about gone and a third still growing. Third in between was just right. This was all Martin's, about 200 plants. Part of the bad was my own doing. Mulched heavy with a mix of wheat straw, white pine needles, and white oak leaves all finely-shredded and applied almost 2" deep. That mat was still intact and keeping the soil too damp. One would think that after growing it for 35 years I should be able to avoid problems. Just proves that I don't have a hotline to Mother Nature who has the final say.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by ladymarmalade on Aug 4, 2017 11:59:08 GMT -5
I dug up my garlic yesterday- it was a really pathetic harvest this year. I'm blaming some on the rains in June, but I'm blaming the bulk of it on leaving the scapes on. I'll not do that again, but lesson learned.
Today I'm going to clean it off and lay it out in the garage to dry out.
I'll be purchasing fresh bulbs from a local farm for planting this fall. Now to think about what I might do with the garlic patch in the meantime (if it ever stops raining).
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Post by tomike on Aug 4, 2017 13:33:10 GMT -5
I'm going to dig up the rest of my garlic over the weekend. Clean it up and have it dry in the garden shed for a week.
That's the plan and the weather forecast is just about right for that plan....
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Post by september on Aug 4, 2017 13:53:48 GMT -5
I've been digging mine up too, and being new at garlic, think mine look pretty good! I agree about removing the scapes, though. I took most off only in my sandy bed, and though I really can't determine difference in the bulb size because the uncut bed is in hard clay, different soil -- but it sure seems like a waste of the plants energy to start preparing the bulbils/seeds and then the plant is pulled before they fully develop. All that energy is wasted on nearly maturing that unused scape. On some, the baby cloves look almost developed enough to survive if I put a bunch of them spaced out in a shallow pot, but on most the flower is just bulgy or barely open. Next time, I will just freeze the extra scapes I can't use up fresh. Plus I keep tripping over those stiff crooked snaking out no good scapes every time I walk by my drying area!
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Post by tomike on Aug 4, 2017 14:35:31 GMT -5
I've been digging mine up too, and being new at garlic, think mine look pretty good! I agree about removing the scapes, though. I took most off only in my sandy bed, and though I really can't determine difference in the bulb size because the uncut bed is in hard clay, different soil -- but it sure seems like a waste of the plants energy to start preparing the bulbils/seeds and then the plant is pulled before they fully develop. All that energy is wasted on nearly maturing that unused scape. On some, the baby cloves look almost developed enough to survive if I put a bunch of them spaced out in a shallow pot, but on most the flower is just bulgy or barely open. Next time, I will just freeze the extra scapes I can't use up fresh. Plus I keep tripping over those stiff crooked snaking out no good scapes every time I walk by my drying area! Not only that September ..(reference to removing the scapes).... the scapes are edible and that's a GOOD thing...... you can also make good garlic butter with the scapes and use it in salads..... but you already know all this....I'm sure.....
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Post by paquebot on Aug 6, 2017 20:40:47 GMT -5
I just shake my head sometimes. No matter how many times that it's been proved that removing scapes does little to affect harvest, there are so many who want to use it as an excuse for their poor results. What they won't do is what we did. That is, leave some on and cut the rest off. Roughly 100 varieties were involved and didn't make one bit of difference.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by september on Aug 7, 2017 9:56:47 GMT -5
Martin, I can't argue with your observations, but I wonder if the results might be affected by the stage in which the scape is removed. Logically, it makes sense that if you cut them very early before, way before the seed capsule has time to enlarge on the scape, the bulb would not have to expend further energy to balloon it out, harden the stalk and form seeds. Now maybe the seeds are totally powered by the dying leaves and not the bulb itself. But the bulb still has to be the intermediary between the leaves and the stalk, so depending on drought or fertility or some other condition that may hasten drying of the leaves, the bulb might at times have to give of itself to mature the seed pod. Then again, maybe not. Maybe once the bulb produces the initial seed stalk, the stalk itself alone is used up by the seed production process. This would might account for no further energy drainage of the bulb itself. I'm just trying to talk my way through this, because I know you can't get something from nothing!
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Post by ladymarmalade on Aug 7, 2017 10:27:50 GMT -5
I just shake my head sometimes. No matter how many times that it's been proved that removing scapes does little to affect harvest, there are so many who want to use it as an excuse for their poor results. What they won't do is what we did. That is, leave some on and cut the rest off. Roughly 100 varieties were involved and didn't make one bit of difference. Martin The truth is more important than the facts. Actually, I did. I had six bulbs where I removed the scapes because I used them to make pesto. Those six bulbs of garlic are the ONLY ones that I harvested that were fat and mature and had fully intact skin covering the cloves. Could there have been something else that caused my pathetic garlic harvest? Absolutely. But the only KNOWN variable that I have is that the scapes remained on 95% of my garlic, and that 95% is undersized and underwhelming. Now, I left the scapes on not as an experiment but because I was out of town for several weeks and thought this was an opportunity to see if there was a noticeable change when leaving the scapes on instead of worrying about it and talking someone through scape removal. My Father-In-Law, on the other hand left the scapes on exactly half of his garlic this year to see if there was any truth to removing/not removing them, so I look forward to hearing his results. For myself, it's been a pretty normal growing year for everything in my garden so far, so I'm currently +1 on scape removal.
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Post by paquebot on Aug 7, 2017 16:17:32 GMT -5
A number of my scapes were removed for friends who wanted them for cooking. As in the past, no noticeable difference in bulb size in that bed. Most were taken from the outside plants. My main bed was long and narrow and block-planted as a 20' long wide row with 100 plants, or, in 20 rows of 5. Grass lawn on one side and deep garden soil on the other. Inch of compost and an inch of old horse manure tilled in. There is a personal goal of seeing a 4" bulb from this variety but could only manage 3½". The kicker is that the biggest bulbs came from the back side of the bed where there was nothing else to compete with their west side except soil while all scapes were intact. The number in that area will be the same next year but the bed will be 5' longer to allow more spacing between plants so that it is less like a long block.
A second bed of 100 had sizes all over the place but that was to be expected. It was the second year removed from 15 years of potatoes. Garlic was not happy in it the year before and told me a second time that something isn't right. I will admit that the cloves used for half of it were not the size of the first 100 but the bulbils for the other half were the biggest. Overall bulb size was about the same from both cloves and bulbils.
As an afterthought, had one deep bed of virtually all "manufactured" soil. (Compost, peat, potting soil, manure, and any other broken bags from a garden center.) 36 bulbils planted in 3 rows of 12 and 8' long. All plants left intact and every bulb was 2¼" to 2½".
If I had only planted in one of those beds, there would only have been one result to observe. If it were the former potato bed, and I was new at growing garlic, I would have been game for any advice as to what to do to get something better. When there are 3 beds of entirely different soil composition, that's the answer. Problem in my case is that there is no way that I can advise anyone on how to duplicate it since there is no recipe or formula.
There's another problem with growing garlic that has somehow taken over but is not the best and that is block planting. The established method 100 years ago was double row, 6" spacing, and 30" between rows. Normal lateral spread of roots is about 18" and thus the need for at least 30" between rows. Somehow the idea of planting in wide blocks with 6" spacing all around has become common and everyone has come to accept 2" bulbs where 3½" are possible. If planting in blocks was the best, commercial growers would be doing it and they are not. At We Grow Garlic, it was always 8" spacing in double rows and about 30" apart just as any other commercial grower would do for maximum results. And as with my home beds, two different fields there and two different results.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by paquebot on Aug 7, 2017 21:51:38 GMT -5
Spent awhile searching for what Jeff Nekola might have archived on the scape topic when he was growing garlic. (He was the first to refer to a garlic bulb as a head and everyone has been confused about how they grow ever since!) Only found secondhand report saying that the "flowers" should be removed. It's one of those things that people are told to do without explanation like removing blossoms from potatoes.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by horsea on Aug 24, 2017 11:54:34 GMT -5
If one wants garlic from digging to digging, need to plant some softnecks, too. They are the only ones that will last a year. I've also had some porcelain last a year. I did throw out some small Martin's a few days ago and some cloves would have been salvageable. But no sense of fooling around with them when I was going to dig today. Martin About those softnecks. Do they retain their good quality for a whole year? I still have some hardnecks from last year, but they are soft and not all that nice flavour-wise. A few days ago I dug up my Leningrads, a Porcelain type. They are more than 5 feet tall. I did not remove the scapes, as you can see. Here is a photo, not the best, maybe. Tried to demonstrate the length but it doesn't come across. The heads are quite large, but not as large as the "Urals", a marble purple stripe kind, which are H-U-G-E. Anyone here ever grow that kind?
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Post by ladymarmalade on Aug 24, 2017 17:31:20 GMT -5
Wowzers, those are some BIG garlic plants!
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Post by pepperhead212 on Aug 24, 2017 19:55:54 GMT -5
I've grown leningrads before, but not ural (doesn't sound familiar, but now I'll be looking!). Leningrad had a medium strong flavor, and large cloves - 4-6/head. But it didn't store as long as porcelains I have grown, so I didn't grow it again. I don't remember the very tall plants, but I have had some much taller varieties in the past that I no longer grow.
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Post by horsea on Aug 24, 2017 23:08:22 GMT -5
I've grown leningrads before, but not ural (doesn't sound familiar, but now I'll be looking!). Leningrad had a medium strong flavor, and large cloves - 4-6/head. But it didn't store as long as porcelains I have grown, so I didn't grow it again. I don't remember the very tall plants, but I have had some much taller varieties in the past that I no longer grow. The tall garlics look lovely in the garden, mind you. I think the catalogue said 5-8 months. "Ural" is a Siberian type, I believe. I got the seed from Golden Acres Farm in Ontario. They don't recommend eating this type raw, but I didn't find out till after I tried doing so. My face went numb after I bit into a sandwich I made out of just one clove. I've never had that happen to me before - and over the years I've grown quite a few different kinds. Growing garlic, trying different classes and varieties, is just so much fun.
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Post by pepperhead212 on Aug 24, 2017 23:21:36 GMT -5
"Ural" is a Siberian type, I believe. I got the seed from Golden Acres Farm in Ontario. They don't recommend eating this type raw, but I didn't find out till after I tried doing so. My face went numb after I bit into a sandwich I made out of just one clove. I've never had that happen to me before - and over the years I've grown quite a few different kinds. Isn't that crazy what some garlic will do to you? A friend, who used to sample garlic varieties with me, sampled the Georgian Fire with me, when it first came on the market, and we had that experience. Both of us had sampled countless varieties, along with hot peppers (red savina the hottest then), and we were amazed how different this was from peppers, as well as horseradish and mustards, as far as how the heat hit us.
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Post by paquebot on Aug 26, 2017 22:52:01 GMT -5
Only 5' tall? Music is the tallest that I've ever grown. There was one which was 78" tall. That's 6½' from bulbils to base of bulb! We did have Leningrad but I don't recall anything spectacular about it.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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Post by pepperhead212 on Aug 26, 2017 23:12:31 GMT -5
Music is one of my largest every season, though I don't really pay much attention to the height - more the diameter of the stalk, as this seems to be a better indicator of bulb size. About those softnecks. Do they retain their good quality for a whole year? They are supposedly longer keeping, but I still don't like the fact that I have to peel so many cloves when using softnecks! lol And one of the only years I grew some, it happened to be a year that we got way too much rain at the end of June, and it basically rotted the tops of the plants, making them disappear! Another advantage to hardnecks - there is always an easy way to find the bulb, even with bad weather, like that. One year, out of curiosity, I left some German White Porcelain hanging in my basement for a year after harvest, and it was still in very good condition, with just a hint of wanting to spout, with a very small green sprout inside the clove, once I cut it open. Definitely one of the longest lasting hardnecks.
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Post by horsea on Aug 27, 2017 11:04:24 GMT -5
Only 5' tall? Music is the tallest that I've ever grown. There was one which was 78" tall. That's 6½' from bulbils to base of bulb! We did have Leningrad but I don't recall anything spectacular about it. Martin The truth is more important than the facts. Well, they were actually 5 ft 6 in. I did not know that "Music" could get that tall.
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Post by paquebot on Aug 27, 2017 11:49:28 GMT -5
Garlic grown in an open field may be a third less in height than in a protected home garden. When I was with We Grow Garlic, it was in open prairie. There wasn't any variety which even got to 4'.
Martin
The truth is more important than the facts.
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