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Garlic Harvest 2010 Begins!

I started today harvesting my first few garlics.  The Asiatic Turban and Creole types always need to be harvested a little earlier that the others, so I started with these.  Even though there are several different varieties of garlic in the picture, they all look pretty similar, with the characteristic reddish skin of the Turban types.

They look really good this year.  They also smell wonderful!  The Turbans are among the most aromatic varieties, and among my favorites.  The only drawback is they do tend to fall apart in the ground if you harvest them too late and they are a little more susceptible to garlic rust.

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Garden Pictures July 2010

It’s time to do a little catching up with blog posts with some pictures from my garden.  The weather has been unbearably hot over the last week or two, and the garden’s been neglected for the sake of avoiding the hot sun.  Please forgive any weeds that may be visible…

Garlic rust is back.  I haven’t been paying close attention, but I think my plants have had it about a week now.  In about two weeks I’m going to begin harvesting, so it doesn’t matter any more.  The garlic will be fine.  Like I’ve posted about before, I sprayed dilute milk on the plants over the last few weeks, and I’m under the impression it help a lot delaying the rust and reducing it’s impact.

Sorry, it’s a little hard to see the forest for the trees in this picture, but this is one of my two corn patches.  This is Golden Bantum sweet corn, in plot number 17, and the plants are now about 5 ft tall with tassels on top.  I got these seeds from Bingenheimer Saatgut in Germany, and this is a locally (Germany) acclimated version of this variety.

Above is my other corn patch.  This is Strawberry Popcorn.  This is a Dutch Heirloom corn.  It may be heirloom other places too, but there was a time it was widely grown here.  Together with the Golden Bantum sweet corn, I’m growing this in search of corn varieties suited for my local climate.

I’m growing popcorn this year in part because I was inspired by Kathy at Skippy’s Garden, who had a good experience with popcorn last year.  Modern popcorn has had so much of it’s flavor bred out of it, then often packaged in microwavable bags.  Most of us (including me) don’t really know what popcorn really tastes like any more.  By growing it yourself, you get a chance to experience the flavor like it’s supposed to be.

Does anyone notice a strawberry theme creeping in here?

I’m really impressed with these white alpine strawberries Alan Bishop bred and sent me, and I think I keep getting more impressed by the day!  This is the second year, which is normally more productive than the first, but wow, these plants are really productive.  Normally alpine strawberries stop producing in the heat of the summer, but we’ve just had a really hot stretch of weather (30C/85F), and these strawberries have just kept going.  I’ve been short on water, and they have been in a dry raised bed, but they haven’t minded.

These strawberries are particularly nice, because the birds can’t find them as they aren’t red, and birds are normally a big problem in this way in my garden.

Finally, Strawberry Spinach…

Never mind the weeds!  Almost everything you see here that’s green in a weed, I just didn’t have a chance to remove them before taking this picture.  Strawberry Spinach is an old weed relative that at one time was widely grown in parts of Europe.  It has leaves that are a spinach substitute, and tasteless red berries that look like strawberries.  The plants have no relation to strawberries.

It’s my first time growing it, and it kind of got lost in the weeds, and I think I planted it a bit close because the plants never got very large and healthy.  In fact the leaves are now too brown to eat, so I don’t even know how they taste.  The red berries are great to look at however!

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Late Scapes

My garlic scapes are really late this year!

This is one of the first and it’s only emerged in the last few days.  We had a cold spring, and I used more straw mulch than usual this year.  Otherwise I haven’t been doing anything unusual.

No sign of garlic rust yet either!  The weather has been unusually cold, then very dry, so perhaps that’s working in my favor this year.

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Allium Roundup

It’s allium season!

Of course you can have alliums most of the year but this is what’s mostly been coming out of the garden lately. Boy do they taste good!  I’ve started to notice my garden is getting especially full of perennial alliums.  Can you ever have too many alliums?

Now for the tour…

This is a new bed I’ve started this year, so it’s not very full yet.  In the front left I have the Utrecht Onion (local version of Allium dictuon) and the right is the Amish Onion.  In the middle left are a few plants of what I call Afghani Leek, because I got them from an Afghani gardener a few gardens down, but I think these are allium currat.  On the right is Mc Cullar’s White Onion, that I got from Stephen (stevil) in Norway last year, and directly behind that is allium ceruum or knodding onion also from Stephen and finally in the back left are Cook’s Multiplier also from Stephen.

While we’ve been eating both the Amish Onion and the Utrecht Onion already this year, the others will have to wait a few years before we have enough to both grow and eat.

In the back of this bed is Heritage Sweet White Multiplier from Søren, but originally from Paquebot in Wisconsin.  In the front are klimt shallots from Frank in Belgium, just starting to poke through the straw.

Here are the two victory onions I got several years ago from Søren.  They are really great, but haven’t been multiplying very much and all we’ve been doing is eating the leaves from time to time.  I’ve been growing them in tubs on our roof.  I think this year I have to try moving them to the garden, and see if they do better there.

These are He Shi Ko Bunching Onion from Baker Creek.  I just bought and planted these, and don’t know a lot about them.

I guess these don’t look a lot different from all the other pictures of onions here, but these are Egyptian Walking Onions.  I got these from Salt Spring Seeds in Canada years ago, and they’ve been going great.

Finally, these are a few of my roughly 1000 bulbs of garlic I grow each year.  I currently have about 60 varieties.

Can you tell I like onions and garlic?  Does anyone have anything else I might want, and want to trade??

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Garlic Harvest

bulbil_plants

This years garlic is all in.  The last was harvested yesterday, and I finished hanging the plants up to dry today.  This was a great year, and I have lots of large and healthy looking bulbs.

As well as regular garlic, this year I grew some bulbils.  Some I got from a fellow garlic grower, and some collected from my own plants.  It was interesting to see the differences in them, and you can see three different varieties in the picture above.  On top the two balls are Estonian Red, the middle a new variety simply called ‘Russian’, and the bottom a variety screaming for a new name called ‘W6 16275’.

You can see the largest plants are about 70-75cm long, about 1/2 that of a full sized plant and formed true but small bulbs with distinct cloves.  The other bulbils formed what you see on top, and resemble a single clove garlic bulb you sometimes see in speciality stores.

Some of the bulbils were so small, and the resulting plants no bigger than a blade of grass, that browned and died off very early.  These mostly got lost in my garden, and so will stay where they are and I’m sure they will come up next year.

In all, the bulbils were a lot more trouble than the rest of the garlic.  I couldn’t put as much straw on them as I did the rest of the garlic because the plants were too small.  This meant I had a lot more weeds, and pulling the weeds tended to disturb the plants.  I’m expecting to end up with full sized bulbs of garlic within a few years.

According to my notes, I harvested the following varieties of full sized garlic:

Antonnik*
Bai Pi Suan
Bogatyr*
Burgundy
Chilean Silver
Creole Red
Cuban Purple
Dauvaga*
Dominics
Elephant
Estonian Red
Finnish
Gazebo Grande
Georgia Fire
Georgian Crystal
German Porcelain
Germinador
GSF #65
Gypsy Red
Hungarian
Irkutsk*
Kallaves*
Krasnodar Red
Londerdel
Martin’s Heirloom
Maxi Top*
Metechi
Music
New Siberian*
Oosterdel
Oregon Blue
Persian Star
Pskem
Purple Glazer
Purple Haze
Purple Italian*
Pyong Vang
Red Toch
Rosewood
Russian Softneck
Shantung Purple
Siberian*
Silver Rose
Sprint*
Susan Delafield
Sweet Haven
Tuscan
Uzbek Turban
Vekak Czech
Vigor*
Vilnius
Wonha
Xian

Those marked with a * are my first year growing the variety, so I probably don’t have enough to share with others except by special request.  As far as the others go, I have some extras I could share if anyone is interested growing it.  Just send me an email and we’ll sort out the details.

For most people I would like you to pay for postage and packaging costs.  Within the Netherlands this is about €9.  Within Europe about €15 and outside of Europe about €25.  I accept payment in US Dollars, Euros and UK Pounds, maybe other currencies with prior agreement,  For a few of the varieties I have some bulbils available, which could be sent at much lower cost.  We can also discuss my only sending a few cloves or only one bulb, that may be at a lower cost.

Shipping is possible to the US as far as I know at the moment, but of course the risk of it not arriving is yours.  Honestly there is so much great garlic available in the US, please try to get it locally unless I have a very special variety you would like to have.  Shipping within Europe is certainly possible.  Other places depend on your local laws.

You can choose the varieties you want from the list above, but what most people do is give me an idea of how many different varieties they would like and I choose the best ones I have available.

If you’re planning to come to the Oxford meeting near the end of October, please get the garlic from me then, I will have several varieties with me and we can arrange any special requests in advance.

It really took a lot of time last year sending out garlic, so this year I will probably limit what I send in several ways.  First, I will probably only send out about 10 requests, first come first served.  Second, I will not accept any new orders after September 1st.  Third, for most people there is a limit of 5 varieties, but if you have special needs let me know.

If you get garlic from me, it would be very much appreciated if you grow it and share with others, especially if you have a blog and could offer it there.  It would save me a lot of trouble if other people helped send it to others.  If you have some to offer now, but don’t have a blog, please let me know and I’ll mention it here.