How To Grow Garlic With Container Organic Gardening

Ask a top French Chef to cook without garlic - you may as well tie his hands behind him!

And this is one crop that you can grow in any organic garden - even in containers on your balcony. No worries about frost because garlic likes the winter.

How to grow garlic

1. Where do you grow them? Push cloves into the ground all over your garden, and let them survive as they will. This will help your other plants. To grow them as crops you should use raised beds. For instance a plastic garbage bin makes a good raised bed if you punch holes in the bottom, and trim it down to about 9 inches high. If you are careful you could get three or four rings out of each bin, each 9 inches high, to make the retaining walls for your raised beds.

Each ring could grow about 25 bulbs, with many cloves in each bulb.

Fill the rings with compost mixed with some soil. It must be will drained and fertile.

2. After a few years you'll have your own stock. To start with you can buy bulbs from an organic grower, or members of an organic club might share bulbs around. Garlic from the shops is usually sprayed to prevent you growing them. Also get your stock locally, because if it is imported it will have different growing seasons.

3. Plant the cloves in autumn (fall). The roots and greens grow in the winter, then in the warmer weather the bulbs thicken out. When the greens wither, harvest them and plait the shrivelled greens to store them hanging over a beam in the garage.

4. Planting is easy. Separate all the cloves in each bulb. If you have a raised bed about 2 ft diameter you can forget about planting in rows. Plant in equilateral triangles of 4 inch sides. To put it another way, plant them in concentric circles that are a little less than 4 inches apart, with each clove about 4 inches from the closest neighbors in adjacent rows. This results in a very even spacing. To plant them, push the flat bit at the bottom into the soil, with the pointy bit at the top just poking above the soil.

5. Looking after your plantation. Don't let it dry out. Don't let weeds shade out your crops.

6. Harvest them before the greens wither completely, on a hot dry day. Loosen the soil, don't pull them out by the greens. Hang them up to dry (don't wash them) keeping an eye on them to make sure they don't become mouldy. Remove any moldy ones immediately. Cut off bulbs as you want to use them.

7. Garlic can

* Lower your blood pressure

* Regulate your blood sugar

* Remove heavy metals from your body

* Kills bacteria and molds

* Even fights viruses - which antibiotics can't do

* Fights yeast infections

* Fights cancer

Of course garlic is a mixture of hundreds of nutrients, but the one that is supposed to have most health benefits only develops when you expose it to air. So put your garlic through a press, exposing the pulp to air for a few minutes before you use it. For instance, I put a pound of garlic through the press to make a stew, leaving it spread over a large plate while I prepare the rest of the stew. I make about two gallons of stew at a time, and freeze portions.

There is even a large mild garlic that we call Russian garlic. You can cook an apple-sized bulb and eat it as a vegetable dish. However you use it, don't miss garlic from your plans for vegetable organic gardening.