What happened to my garlic? Last year, I decided that growing garlic was soooo easy, and this year half of my heads were itsy bitsy. I guess gardening is like that. I believe the size issues were a result of not enough water during April and May (because I didn't hook up my drip irrigation until the end of May). I also didn't fertilize them. They were already in the ground and growing when we added compost and tilled it into the rest of the garden soil and I forgot to give them a special tea elixir to help them plump up. Oh, well.
I harvested our garlic back in July and while all the heads were a little smaller than I was hoping for, I did end up with a large batch of usable bulbs. Not bad considering the degree of neglect!
You might remember from a previous post that I was going to compare growing garlic right from the supermarket to the special garlic sold at our local nursery. As you can see from the photo above, even with my marginal growing conditions this season, the Safeway garlic did just as well if not a tad better than the nursery garlic and my garlic from the previous season.
One thing I am taking to heart when I plant my next batch of garlic next week, is that the size of the clove you plant is directly proportional to the size of the bulb it will produce. Since my bulbs from this harvest are small, I opted to buy huge planting bulbs from a new local source called Grow Organic.....and I may throw in a few big Safeway cloves too for fun.
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