Garlic is a reliable garden powerhouse, growing through the winter when most other plants are fast asleep or dead. It’s a great choice for a gardener wishing to grow more of their own food – garlic isn’t cheap and is fairly easy to grow and store. It is easy enough that it is feasible to grow a whole year’s worth of garlicky goodness in your backyard on a fairly small plot of land.
There are several main types of garlic and many more varieties that do not easily fit into any categories. The kind you buy in the grocery store is almost always softneck, simply because it stores far better than any other kind of garlic. There is a lot more diversity in garlic than just the supermarket kind, however, and I am trying to expand my garlic growing operation to better suit the needs of my family. I am trying two new varieties, a hardneck and a softneck, to serve as an addition to the hardneck variety I currently grow (‘Spanish Roja’).
The first new variety is ‘Musik,’ a well-regarded variety of porcelain hardneck garlic, known for superior yield and good flavor. Hardneck varieties store poorly, often around 4-6 months, but have a number of benefits. Their cloves tend to be larger and more uniform in size and are easier to peel. The flavor is often superior to softneck varieties as well.
In order to grow a years worth of garlic I cannot rely on the hardnecks alone. They simply do not last long enough in storage, which means a midsummer harvest would no longer be edible by the middle of winter. Softneck varieties, though they are much harder to peel, store significantly longer. Their skins hug and cover the clovers far more strongly and as a result these varieties can store for 9-12 months, just long enough to allow me to raise a whole year of garlic. Elephant garlic can pick up the slack, as in my experience it can store well beyond a year before it begins to turn.
This new variety is ‘Nootka Rose,’ a lovely heirloom silverskin softneck from the PNW that yields well in our environment and has a strong garlic flavor. The cloves are large for a softneck and the minor scratches I created as I separated them caused the release of a very nice garlicky smell, a good sign.
Though ‘Nootka Rose’ has decent sized cloves, ‘Musik’ absolutely dwarfs them. Huge, huge cloves.
I am planting two plots of garlic this year. For these new varieties I am using a bed that grew Nigella last year, so I will be planting garlic directly into the stubble. I first spread a layer of compost on the top of the stubble, mixed with the last remnants of composted steer manure I picked up free on the facebook marketplace.
Garlic is usually planted 4-6 inches apart, so I stuck with that spacing. I have gone as close as 4 inches on every side, but I opted this year to grow larger garlic bulbs and thus tried to keep it at a wider spacing. I planted all my new seed garlic and filled in the rest with my Spanish Roja hardneck garlic.
I covered the cloves up with a couple inches of compost and then added chicken manure pellets and lime, as I have not limed this bed in a long time.
And finally, a thick layer of leaf mulch on top.
I’ll need to improve my labels a bit later so they survive the winter.