With just a couple of weeks until winter begins its annual bite, now’s a good time to look at some of the annual planting vegetables and fruit.
Garlic can be planted in New Zealand between late April and July, with a traditional planting date of winter solstice (June 22 this year).
Garlic is a surprisingly easy crop to grow that unlike some of its other allium cousins, doesn’t take up a lot of room.
That said, like many other plants, it will give of its best if the soil bed has been well prepared first with a mix of sheep pellets, blood and bone and a bit of dolomite lime.
This gives the cloves you plant time to begin to form the good-sized bulbs you want, which begin to grow in earnest in November.
The trick to getting big bulbs is two-fold, make sure you keep the bed or pot (they grow equally well in these) well-watered in a sunny, well-draining position. There are those who have found their bulbs don’t form and the reasons for this are usually inconsistent watering, if the soil became waterlogged for a long time or conversely, dry for a long period. Alternatively, if the cloves were planted less than 5cm deep, the results can be the same.
To plant, you’ll need to buy bulbs of garlic much like the supermarket ones (don’t use these as they are often treated to inhibit sprouting).
Break the bulb apart into the cloves, again same as you would if using it for cooking. Plant each clove no less than 5cm deep in the soil and cover.
To ensure good growth, feed every month or so, climbing to once a fortnight near harvest time. The best for this is a seaweed mixture and my favourite standby, Tui’s Nova Tec. Keep an eye out for aphids and treat if they appear.
Like other members of its family, harvesting garlic involves digging around each bulb and laying it on top of the ground for a day or two. I dry mine like I do my onions, by pegging the stalks onto a clotheshorse for a couple of weeks or so in a dry place. Once fully dry, I’ll braid together for storage.
This is also the month when commercial growers get the strawberries into the ground – you get your fruit earlier and bigger if you do now. Those who have severe frosts on a regular basis might like to wait until late winter, but for most in the King Country, now is a good time.
Using a good strawberry soil mix and food is a good idea if you are planting new ones this month, or, as I will be doing next week, taking the baby runners off the mother plant and planting out. Mound the plants; they don’t like their feet to be kept too wet. The rule of thumb is five plants per person in the household.
Feed once a month with specific strawberry fertilisers or seaweed tonics, and best to mulch with straw mid to late winter, which you’ll keep on until harvest begins.
