Allotments 4 All
Produce => Edible Plants => Topic started by: plotstoeat on October 11, 2018, 16:35:34
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Having great difficulty finding any garlic to plant this year. Tried two Wilkos and The Range. Any ideas?
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I always save the largest three bulbs of each variety I grow for replanting.
Sometimes after a few years ( usually around 5 years) if I find that the crop return is deteriorating I buy new stock!
On occasions I have been known to go to a supermarket or greengrocers and select three good quality bulbs to source new stock, and sometimes I buy it from a reputable supplier.
OK there are some people who would say that buying from store is not a good practice and they may be right but I have never had problems from this practice.
The choice is yours!
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got loads of elephant garlic grown this year
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Strange that the Range did not have them, look again in with the flowering bulbs, that is were I found mine early last week. 3 mixed packets of onions and garlic for a fiver. I got 20 cloves from the 3 bulbs and about 70 onion sets a bag in the red and white varieties. All of them spotted just peaking above ground this morning. You will have to fight your way through the xmas display to get to the garden department.
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I just got some from a reseller on amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Live-Seeds/b/ref=bl_dp_s_web_4760466031?ie=UTF8&node=4760466031&field-lbr_brands_browse-bin=Live+Seeds
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There is a local workers cooperative not far from me. Nice place with a strong commitment to fair trade principles and stocks quite a range of organic produce. Also commits to donating a proportion of profits to educational charities.
Got my autumn garlic there - six large bulbs yielded 59 good sized cloves for just £4. (£1 per bulb or 3 bulbs for £2). Happy to support them and pretty good value for money too.
Make friends with your fellow plot holders and see if they can offer any advice. I was tipped off by a nearby plot holder. You will gradually build up a valuable list of local sources for all sorts of useful stuff like pallet wood, cuttings, seed sharing, horse manure, etc, etc. Often cheaper than the main garden centres too. Sometimes free if you take it away.
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There is a local workers cooperative not far from me. Nice place with a strong commitment to fair trade principles and stocks quite a range of organic produce. Also commits to donating a proportion of profits to educational charities.
Got my autumn garlic there - six large bulbs yielded 59 good sized cloves for just £4. (£1 per bulb or 3 bulbs for £2). Happy to support them and pretty good value for money too.
Do they function online?
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Do they function online?
Apparently they do, and they have a website. The address is The Daily Bread Co-operative Ltd, The Old Laundry, Bedford Road, Northampton. NN4 7AD. But the main business is aimed towards food, such as cereals, dried fruits nuts and seeds, spices etc etc. The part of the business that sells a few plants and shrubs, compost and seeds etc is very small and does not seem to be part of the online offer. I suppose they are mostly bulky items where carriage / p&p would rule it out.
Cheers
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Apparently they do, and they have a website. The address is The Daily Bread Co-operative Ltd, The Old Laundry, Bedford Road, Northampton. NN4 7AD. But the main business is aimed towards food, such as cereals, dried fruits nuts and seeds, spices etc etc. The part of the business that sells a few plants and shrubs, compost and seeds etc is very small and does not seem to be part of the online offer. I suppose they are mostly bulky items where carriage / p&p would rule it out.
Fabulous place! Go there several times a year to stock up on nuts, pulses and spices. Also wonderful gifts like lovely handmade soaps. :wave:
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Like Tee Gee I save my own usually about 8 of the biggest from 4 varieties and about every 5 years I replace some or sometimes all of my stock. I usually set around 200 cloves . I have tried occasionally to use supermarket bulbs with varying degrees of success as it all depends on where they were grown in the first place. My local Wilkos had stock a few weeks ago but they were pathetic my own stock are double the size of the ones they were selling. The bigger the clove the bigger the bulb it produces. I only use the biggest cloves when setting my wife will use the smaller ones that I discard in her cooking. It is no use setting small cloves you will be disappointed with the end product.
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Last year, not knowing any better, I planted every single clove of the bulbs I bought and every single one produced a bulb, some clearly fatter and bulkier than others but still a good result. Previous attempts in my last garden - colder and wetter - just led to a total loss to frozen mush.
I expect a lot has to do with a) beginners' luck and b) the right variety for local conditions. Growing a supermarket variety could be a crap shoot and also lead to the introduction of unfriendly viruses and pathogens. We have enough to worry about without taking unnecessary risks so I will always buy fresh stock until I get to a stage where I have garlic left over to spare which is, at the mo, unlikely as I used loads in my passata to preserve the tomato glut.
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The bigger the clove the bigger the bulb it produces.
Very true, and the same thing goes for true shallots - if you ignore this it's easy to be trapped into a downward spiral of bulb size (and you can get even tinier cloves than you'd expect from that size of head - making it doubly disappointing).
The exception is Elephant Garlic - a tiny clove will not produce a head - but if well-grown it frequently produces a single spherical bulb that can actually be bigger and heavier than the best-grown clove - making it even nicer roasted whole because there's less shrinkage (though it might take a bit longer to cook right through).
It's worth a try - a single bulb 6cm across is really impressive. Any failures are still big enough to use.
You might find this type of bulb appearing on true garlic, but very, very occasionally - I've probably seen 5 in the last 30 years (and some of those might have been volunteer elephants) - certainly not worth trying as the failures are almost completely useless.
Cheers.
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Thanks for all the interesting replies. I tried a garden centre yesterday only to find it had closed so I decided to get some from Lidl. I lost my allotment this year when my friend whose land I shared moved house. So no worries about disease spreading.
I planted deeper and wider apart than normal (8cm x 20cm) and used only the plump cloves. I will also use some of my Casablanca from this year's harvest. I find a feed of liquid seaweed in the Spring helps the bulb swell. Couldn't bear the thought of no fresh garlic.
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Not directly relevant but at the weekend we went to the Brogdale national Apple day event. While in the Faversham area we visited a local delicatessen and there found some of the best looking garlic bulbs I've seen in ages. They were huge with that strong pink tinge common for some varieties.
The sign said French grown in the Normandy area. I had no need for any but if I'd been looking for cloves to plant I would certainly have taken the risk and bought a bunch.
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Do they function online?
Apparently they do, and they have a website. The address is The Daily Bread Co-operative Ltd, The Old Laundry, Bedford Road, Northampton. NN4 7AD. But the main business is aimed towards food, such as cereals, dried fruits nuts and seeds, spices etc etc. The part of the business that sells a few plants and shrubs, compost and seeds etc is very small and does not seem to be part of the online offer. I suppose they are mostly bulky items where carriage / p&p would rule it out.
Cheers
Daily Bread did used to have a store in cambridge as well it was a great place to get flour http://dailybreadcambridge.org/