[QUOTE=neoguy;80029]If you guys don't quit talking about that great BBQ you'll have to send all of us some:twisted: . Nothing like some good BBQ in the middle of winter up north!!![/QUOTE]

Yup, y'all better send some of that good BBQ up here. We'll swap you some snow for it, we have plenty. :twisted:

Must admit I hear a lot about the virtues of various garlic varieties, but I haven't been growing my own and never paid much attention to where the store-bought garlic came from.

But there's still time to plant it here before the ground freezes and I think the local Agway still has some in stock, so maybe I'll get some from there and some from the grocery store (whether it's imported from China or wherever), stick it in a convenient spot in the garden, and see how it does. :)

Sorry Guys! someone mentioned food and I forgot what I was talking about. (Senior Moment):?

Does anyone use a lot of bonemeal in the bottom of the row. I did for the first time this year and had some really good size heads. Don't know if it really helped or just because we got a good monsoon season with a lot of rain. 8)

Bone meal is excellent. I sprinkle it on the beds before planting. In mid spring I side dress with blood meal. Last year I had some of the biggest bulbs ever.

Alex

Glad to hear that velekipop, I've used it on tomato plants for a number of years and just recently started using both bonemeal and bloodmeal on other veggies with good results so far. 8)

[quote=mdvpc;79502]Tuk-I was in Tucson for 2 days last week. The weather was beautiful! Problem is, I grow only in containers, and Bark's comment was that for the space of one tomato plant, you could grow enough garlic for a family. I guess I will research this over the holiday.[/quote]

Michael, there is a lot of good information on growing garlic on the Gourmet Garlic Gardens site. Bob is a Texas grower and goes into some specifics for growing in our climate. Planting depth is different, for one. He also talks about which varieties tend to do the best here. I talked to him once and he is very knowledgeable and nice.

[URL]http://www.gourmetgarlicgardens.com/growsouth.htm[/URL]

[URL]http://www.gourmetgarlicgardens.com/growing.htm[/URL]

I planted my cloves six inches apart, got around 144 cloves in a 3x12 bed. I don't think it's recommended to plant much closer than that though. You could plant on the same spacing in a container.

Suze-thanks for the link-I will check it out.

Not that it matters but I have posted that link before.
I'm glad to see it posted again.

I emailed the guy and invited him to tomatoville but he said he was too busy to do so.:)
He gave me the address to a man in OK that he said would be interested in the site but I would have to look a long time for the address.:(

Suze is right he is a very nice down to earth person.:)

Worth

Well... back to the Garlic from CHINA issue....

I grow garlic for my CSA customers (a dozen of them) and Farmers' Market and our family. For me, it is expensive to grow because organic bulbs costs so much to purchase. I do save some of my own for growing, but never enough. And then the WORK that is required! YIKES. Preparing the soil with 2-4" of manure, planting each little clove by hand, mulching leaves so that each bed gets 4-6" of cover. Then I have to put row covers over that and corn stalks to keep the hens out. Then as someone else commented... THE WEEDING! Yikes! Then the digging, drying, cleaning, sorting by size ... OH MY! I charge $1 per bulb for my garlic and I just shutter with ANGER when I see garlic from china (which I've recently read is subsidized :x $%#&) at $1 for 5 BULBS! How is that possible????? Shipped from across the ocean!??? It makes me SO MAD....

(Deep Breath).... SIGH

It's no wonder farmer's can't make a living in the US.... :(

Lisa

Lisa,

What you go through must be very frusterating for sure. In Canada small organic farmers have a very difficult time competing with foreign producers. I know of a small organic farmer who raises turkeys. She has to abide by regulations and all sorts of red tape, none of which is required from off shore importers. The small organic farmer or any local farmer for that matter cannot compete in this sort of skewed market.

Yet governments are jumping on the band wagon of environmentalism and urging consumers to buy local.
It makes no sense!!!:x :?

I was looking thru the garden today, planting some tomatoes and ... I guess just admiring the greenery in general, when I saw a few weeds within the garlic bed. I reached in to grab a weed, pulled a bit ... then noticed it wasn't a weed, but a garlic plant that had died. I figured it just didn't get as much sunlight as its quite happy neighbors are still getting, so it gave up the fight. I pulled some more, couldn't get it out of the ground. Grabbed a trowel, dug down, and pulled up a REAL nice sized head. 2.8 ounces, I weighed later. There were three more near dead soon to be ex-garlic plants in the same row; I removed those as well. There was a monster head -- 3.5 ounces! Sheez, I thought there wasn't even supposed to be swelling of the cloves til late June.

Four proper sized heads (2.0, 2.7, 2.8, and 3.5 ounces). Though I noticed them just today (30 May), these things have been ready to harvest for a couple weeks, as evidenced by just a few thin wisps of rotten paper skins randomly around the cloves. There was still one entire layer around the 3.5 ounce head, so that one looks the nicest; the others, virtually paperless, are a bit dirty, understandably so.

[B][COLOR=green][I'll post pics later -- the Boss is in Lexington KY with the camera, snapping pix of horses; her priorities differ from mine.][/COLOR][/B]

I checked my planting notes to see what variety these heads were ... and wouldn't you know it, they're the Made In China stuff that I was lamenting last year on this same thread, which is why I searched for and resurrected it.

The mind boggles. If the China stuff normally matures here in the States in early to mid-May, that would extend the season here two full months. WOW. More good garlic to eat, and perhaps make a killing at the farmer's market.

No way I'll be able to keep these things til October to plant; now I'm actually *hoping* to find more Product Of China garlic at K-Mart come September. Sacrilege.

Full garlic in May. Amazing. Oh, and it tastes REAL good too, just like it did last year. [COLOR=seagreen][B]China > Gilroy[/B][/COLOR]? Again, sacrilege.

Dumbfounded,
Jay

Wow, that would be great to harvest some garlic before mid August! I'm almost out of the garlic powder I made a couple months ago with what was left of last years bulbs.

We don't have K Mart here, but I'd bet Walmart's garlic is from China, just like everything else they sell.

Don't be shock! Many farmers who use to grow garlic or other crops now being replace by China and other countries. They will grow something better.


CORN CORN CORN CORN CORN

We need Corn for Ethanols, animal feed, high fructose corn syrup, and other [URL="http://www.ontariocorn.org/classroom/products.html"]multi-use[/URL]. Corn going to replace most of the crops here in the USA. Muhahaha

I expect your garlic is an Asiatic which are a weakly bolting type sometimes hardneck sometimes softneck. The reason it is growing so fast is that it would have been in cold storage and would have started the growing process as soon as it was put on display in the store.

Henry

Like Jay,

I also planted the Chinese garlic (from supermarket) last October and just harvest 8 of them.
The bulb size are a lot bigger then the last year messidrom garlic bulbs. I got 3 huge bulbs and 5 normal size bulb (similar size with those from supermarket)...will save the biggest bulbs as seed :).

I also planted chinese garlic (10 bulbs 99cents for all) how in the world, they were also all different sizes from very large down to the size I originally planted. I've not had a variety to fluctuate in size so dramatically from one planting. I love the sharp flavor and will continue to grow and try to get a uniform crop from the larger cloves.8)