In Pursuit of Garlic (7 page)

Garlic that doesn’t get enough to drink suffers stress and may start to produce bulbs early, resulting in smaller cloves and bulbs. The bulbs may shatter at harvest, too, meaning the skins split and leave the cloves underneath vulnerable to bacteria and rotting. Split skin is okay if you have a small crop and expect to eat it within a few weeks, but the bulbs won’t store successfully; nor, as mentioned, should you use them as seed stock.

Watering requires a commonsense approach. Plants need enough for healthy growth, but they shouldn’t be sitting in puddles. An inch or two (2.5 to 5 centimeters) of water a week is ideal, applied with a soaker hose or sprinkler in the morning if there hasn’t been enough rain. Give the plants a deep watering rather than a surface sprinkling. Garlic may be shallow rooted, but the soil must be damp enough deeply enough to prevent it from drying out quickly. Sandy soil needs to be watched because it dries out fast in hot, sunny weather.

Make sure the soil is damp when you plant the cloves so that the roots can begin to grow immediately—languishing in dry soil makes them prone to disease or deterioration. When harvest time approaches, garlic needs less water so that growth will slow and the bulbs can mature. I never pray for rain after the middle of July, and in a heavy downpour I’m tempted to rush into the garden and hold an umbrella over the garlic patch to protect the plants from soggy soil that might encourage rot. There’s not much you can do about an unwelcome rainfall, but you can withhold extra irrigation via the sprinkler.

Loamy soil high in organic matter, which holds moisture but doesn’t get waterlogged, is more important than a truckload of fertilizer. If any fertilizer is needed, it will be nitrogen, as my oracle Judith advised. Plants lacking nitrogen look poorly—during the growing season, they show weakened vigor and a general yellowing, and they produce small bulbs earlier than normal. Judith follows the general rule and mixes blood meal with the soil when she’s planting the cloves, then applies it as a side dressing a couple of times during the season.

Nitrogen encourages foliage growth and can slow bulb formation near harvest time, so hold off on fertilizer altogether as harvest approaches.

Because it’s a root crop, garlic may also benefit from a little potassium. Wood ashes are a good organic form.

There’s something to be said for being smelly and strong tasting—it chases away diseases and pests. For millennia garlic’s sulfurous compounds have defended it against plant-eating pests and have poisoned strains of fungi and bacteria that dared invade its skin. But garlic isn’t immune to everything, and the list of its biological enemies below may suggest that garlic isn’t all that tough. Still, most of its threats aren’t deadly and can be controlled by good garden practices, such as removing and destroying plants that look sick, avoiding too much watering and subsequent soggy soil and humid air, and planting only healthy, unblemished cloves with intact skins. Crop rotation (changing the planting location) also helps prevent the spread of viruses and fungi, and it’s always a good idea when you trim or deadhead neighboring plants to remove plant debris from the area in case it’s harboring bugs or disease.

VIRUSES ARE common, and although most aren’t fatal, they will affect a plant’s vigor. Symptoms of viruses can include striping, streaking, or mottling on the leaves and twisted or stunted leaves, and if one plant has a virus, it’s likely to soon spread to others via aphids or thrips. Practice prevention: keep plants healthy and unstressed by making sure they have enough water and a fertile soil.

A couple of stem rots caused by soilborne fungi in the
Fusarium
genus can affect the stem plate, leaving it with rotted roots, brownish discoloration, or lesions with a reddish fringe. Early symptoms include yellowing leaf tips and shoot dieback, though sometimes leaves show no symptoms at all. Blue mold, caused by various strains of
Penicillium
molds, can enter bulbs through damage during storage or can invade damaged cloves separated from the mother bulb too long before planting. Infected cloves may not grow or may produce weak plants with yellow leaves, though strong plants often overcome the disease. An infected bulb can easily spread the mold to its neighbors in storage.

Pink root, which is caused by a fungus active in temperatures above 75°F (24°C), attacks the plant’s roots, turning them pink. You might see a little leaf browning, but the plant doesn’t usually die. Pink root may reduce crop yields, however.

Rust, another fungus, shows up as yellow or white spots or streaks on leaves followed by orange pustules filled with orange spores. If the disease worsens, black pustules appear. High humidity and low rainfall encourage the disease, but, oddly, warm weather (above 75°F, or 24°C) or temperature below 50°F (10°C) inhibits it. Although rust is not often a problem, it will spread easily by wind if it gets a foothold—a late-1990s outbreak in California severely reduced crop yields. Again, prevention is key. Keep plants healthy and unstressed, without either too much or too little water, and avoid applying too much nitrogen.

WHITE ROT, caused by
Sclerotium cepivorum,
has been responsible for many crop losses in the United States and other parts of the world. It also affects other members of the
Allium
genus. It starts as a fluffy white mycelium—a network of branching, threadlike spores—on the stem plate, which then advances up the plant. Growth is stunted, and leaves yellow and die. If only one plant appears to be infected, both it and the surrounding soil should be dug up and removed and the adjacent soil fumigated. But once the fungus has become established, alliums cannot be grown on the site for many years.

When a cow has been three nights with almost no grass, give her a preparation of two parts grass to one part garlic stalks. A Brahmin can then partake of her milk and maintain propriety.

THE BOWER MANUSCRIPT

INSECTS THAT affect garlic include mites, and an infestation can destroy a bulb. Onion maggots and thrips sometimes attack garlic; the maggots bore into the bulbs, and the thrips chew on the precious leaves. Microscopic nematodes, or eelworms, eat garlic, onions, leeks, and chives, as well as celery and parsley. The nematodes are so tiny they’re invisible. In severe cases the bulb may separate from the underground stem and turn into a pulpy mass—sometimes when you try to harvest the bulb it’s not there. Planting only healthy, unblemished bulbs is the best way to prevent nematodes, but pouring hot water over cloves you’re about to plant might kill the little devils.

There’s one bug that’s scaring the garden gloves off garlic growers in eastern Canada these days: the leek moth,
Acrolepiopsis assectella.
It’s an uninvited European species that probably made its way to Canada on infected plant material, and it has been significantly damaging garlic crops in eastern Ontario, southern Quebec, and Prince Edward Island since it appeared in the Ottawa area in 1993, tunneling into and eating the leaves, scapes, and bulbs. It’s now reported in upper New York State. In March 2010 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency released a parasitic wasp in hopes it would control the moth, but results won’t be known for several years.

If you live in these areas and discover the leek moth, Paul Pospisil of the
Garlic News
suggests an old-fashioned approach to control: checking for cocoons and larvae daily and crushing them by hand to reduce the population. The larvae can reach just over half an inch (1.4 centimeters) in length and are yellowish-green with pale brown heads and eight gray spots on each abdominal segment. Adult moths are reddish-brown, about one-quarter inch (0.6 centimeters) long, with a white triangular mark in the middle of the folded wings; hind wings are heavily fringed and pale gray to black.

Gophers love garlic and will eat the whole crop if they can. Chester Aaron, who grows garlic in Sonoma County, California, and is the author of
The Great Garlic Book, Garlic Is Life, Garlic Kisses,
and more, protects his garlic by growing it in raised beds framed with wood and set on chicken wire. Grasshoppers can be a threat: in Texas it was reported that a heavy infestation in 2004 destroyed 24,000 plants; the varmints ate the tops and then somehow dug into the ground to get at the succulent bulbs. It’s impossible to protect against an army of grasshoppers, but for a smaller invasion Ted Meredith, author of
The Complete Book of Garlic,
suggests that floating row covers (plastic or fabric stretched over the bed on metal hoops, available at garden supply stores) could mount a defense for a short period. Row covers retain heat and if left on too long could bring the plants to maturity too soon.

A few weeks before you dig up mature hardneck bulbs, remove the scapes so that the plant can put all of its energy into bulb development—some growers say that leaving them on can reduce the yield of a field of garlic by as much as 33 percent. Snip them off with scissors or carefully snap them off where you see a white or pinkish spot on the stem.

Digging up the bulbs is the most fun of all, but knowing exactly when to do it can seem complicated. With all garlic, both hardneck and softneck, if you harvest too early the bulbs won’t have reached optimum growth and flavor; too late and they will have burst their wrappers and left themselves vulnerable to bacteria, which would spell doom for successful storing. The bulbs might even have separated, leaving them useless for planting, although you could eat them right away.

Garlic should be harvested when some of the leaves are still green and some have browned, but exactly how many of each is a matter of discussion among some garlic growers. Some say half of the leaves should be brown; others say much more than half is desirable. Still others say the best time is when half of the leaves are half browned. Got it? It does get complicated, perhaps unnecessarily so. Commercial growers in California leave their softneck garlic in the ground till the tops brown and collapse, because they’re easier to harvest with no green stems. I start with the half-and-half-of-total-leaves formula and then follow my instincts. If the plant is still looking too perky, even though half the leaves seem nicely browned, I leave it in a few more days.

Generally speaking, most softneck garlic and the Asiatics, Turbans, and Creoles—which sometimes grow a short scape (it depends on their environment or their ancestry)—are content to stay in the ground longer than other hardnecks. There are no hard-and-fast rules for garlic, but it is this flexibility that makes it an easy plant to raise, despite all these caveats.

Dig plants individually, using a trowel or a fork to loosen the soil before you gently pull them up. Brush loose dirt off newly dug cloves or let it dry and fall off, but wash off sticky clay right away, being sure to dry off the cloves and hang them upside down so that water doesn’t enter the neck of the bulb. I trim off the roots at this point, but some gardeners leave them on until the final cleaning.

Let the bulbs lie uncrowded in a cool, shaded area, on a wire rack or a slotted surface, for a week or so. (I leave mine on the slatted bench built into our deck under an overhead trellis, and amazingly the raccoons leave them alone. I guess, unlike gophers, they haven’t discovered the gourmet delights of garlic.) Then brush off the rest of the dried soil—an artist’s paintbrush or a toothbrush works well—and tie the stems in small labeled bunches of one variety. Hang them in your garage or garden shed or on a rack in a protected place. They should cure for a few weeks to develop their flavor—four is a rough guideline, but two weeks is okay. It depends on how humid your climate is. Once the leaves and stems are quite brown and dead, the time is ripe to prepare your garlic for long-term storage.

If I play with garlic, my hands are bound to stink.

POMPONIUS, 110–132 BC

This is the knottiest problem for home growers who don’t have a cold cellar and want to store garlic for several months. Ideally, garlic you want to keep into the winter should be stored at 56 to 59°F (13 to 15°C) with low humidity—45 to 50 percent. A wine cellar is perfect. So, strangely enough, is my bedroom closet, which is next to an outer wall in our older house; there are some advantages to poor insulation. I discovered this quite by accident when I wondered why my clothes were so cold and stuck a thermometer on the floor of the closet. My garlic lasts for six to eight months there, depending on variety.

But garlic will last for three or four months under a wider range of temperatures, including cool room temperature, about 68°F (20°C). As with other root vegetables, warm temperatures dry out the cloves and humidity causes mold to develop. Some commercial growers say bulbs can be stored at the freezing point and a slightly higher humidity with good results. One experiment kept bulbs beautifully at exactly 27°F (–3°C) for eight months, and they stayed in good condition for up to two months after coming to room temperature. But I can’t control my freezer that precisely, so mine won’t be coming out of the closet.

Whatever you do, don’t store garlic in the fridge. Refrigerators hit that magic range from 40 to 50°F (5 to 10°C) where garlic decides it’s early spring and time to sprout. Sprouted garlic is edible but past its prime, especially if the sprout has grown to an inch (2.5 centimeters) or more.

Garlic needs air circulation, too, so don’t store it in paper bags. Most mail-order growers send the bulbs in mesh bags, which are ideal; I also save onion bags from the grocery store, and in a pinch I’ve used the legs of panty hose, with the feet cut out and tied off.

Storing garlic for planting in the fall is easy; it can be kept at anywhere from 50°F (10°C) to room temperature until it’s time to pop the cloves into the ground.

Garlic is at its juiciest when first harvested, and the flavor gets richer during storage. But there is a cutoff point when it starts to lose its bloom—just like carrots or potatoes stored too long. Generally speaking, hardnecks don’t last as long as softnecks, and their flavor peaks earlier. The Rocamboles and Purple Stripes should be eaten sooner than, say, the Silverskins. But this is general: the Creoles, one of the three mentioned earlier that are officially grouped as hardnecks yet grow only a short scape, if any, are among the longest lasting of garlic varieties—they’ll keep for up to a year in the right conditions. Labels are advisable when storing garlic. Again, for help with what to plant, plus tasting notes for a few varieties, see “A Garlic Primer.”