#alys fowler

How to grow the best garlic

Plant garlic now and by next summer you’ll be proudly pulling up a bulb

After salads, garlic is right up there for a crop everyone should try to grow. Pop a clove in the ground and wait; by next summer you’ll be proudly pulling up a bulb. It’s such deliciously good maths.

Of course there’s a world of difference between a tiny bulb with slivers for cloves and plump ones. Any garlic clove will grow over the winter, but what you want is something substantial.

Each clove must spend 30 days and nights below 10C for bulb initiation to occur. If garlic doesn’t have a cold spell you get a single bulb with no cloves, which looks much like a tiny white onion. Cold nights divide the bulb into many.

That is why you should plant garlic now: the autumn soils are warm enough to start growth. By December you should have a little green shoot poking out of the soil, but as the temperature drops the garlic slows green growth above ground and does its magic below.

In spring, when the days lengthen and the soil warms, the plant swings back into action. If you failed to pull up all your garlic from last year and find a flurry of small green spring shoots, don’t waste them – they are quite a pungent delicacy, to be used like chives.

How to grow great brassicas – from brussels sprouts to cabbages

Garlic likes rich, free-draining soil. On heavy clay it’s worth growing garlic on a ridge of soil. Plant bulbs 10cm deep, a little less on heavy soil, and in full sun. They should be 18cm apart in each direction, or in rows 30cm apart with 10cm between cloves. Squishing garlic together will result in very small cloves. It thrives on potash; fresh ash from Bonfire night can be worked into the ground before planting. I feed again in mid-spring with seaweed or comfrey to top up growth, but if your soil is in reasonable health, you need to do little to please garlic. In pots, feed it weekly from mid-spring, as the food source in shop-bought compost will have started to run out.

Garlic is little bothered by slugs or snails, but there’s a vicious allium leaf miner that shreds the leaves and lays pupae in the bulb – not pleasant, and best defended with Enviromesh net covering placed over the crop just after planting. Allium rust can be another problem; this over-winters on chives and spring onions. If you find orange pustules on the leaves of any of these, dig them up and wait a year before planting any alliums.

There are many varieties: anything that ends in Wight comes from the Garlic Farm on the Isle of Wight and has been selected to do well in our climate. I think hard-neck types have the best flavour: try ‘Bohemian Rose Wight’, from North Bohemia, or the beautifully marbled Caulk Wight. I’ve a soft spot for the soft-necked types, too, which tend to store longer: ‘Christo’ has a punchy flavour and ‘Picardy Wight’ does well in damper soils. As for ordering, I plant about 40 cloves to keep me in year-round supply. Each bulb has five to 10 cloves, depending on the variety.

No it probably shouldn’t matter, but in the rarefied world of genteel lawns and swaying perennial borders, there is such a thing as the green closet.

On a garden open day, the only thing that is more likely to get a garden visitor to choke on their scone or keel over like an unstaked delphinium is that they are looking at a garden made by “the ladies” which is the polite term applied to my wife and I at such events. I should point out that it is me that does all the gardening; she has an aversion to slugs but is happy to trot along to the garden centre as and when required.

So in honour of the new memoir by late lesbian bloomer, Alys Fowler, I thought it would be fun to list writers who share the same sun drenched border as she does.

Colette; more a dabbler but wrote variously on subject of gardening which have been gathered together in the anthology Flowers and Fruit

Alice B Toklas-picking tiny wild strawberries for Gertrude in their French garden in the last chapter of her cookbook which she actually did write.

Constance Spry- famous more for flower arranging but still wrote about gardens in her Garden Notebook

Vita Sackville-West: her and her husband’s biggest life work together is, of course, Sissinghurst and her thoughts on it were kept in her journals along with the hiatuses from it for her affairs with Violet Trefusis and Virginia Woolf.

Willa Cather as well as writing about the Nebraskan plains to almost the point of triteness, Cather did use the metaphor of the garden as a means by which her immigrant protagonists in her novels make sense of their new environments. See The Old Professor or the opening of The Song of the Lark or The Country of The Pointed Firs

Charlotte Mendelssohn reflects on her obsession with her small town house vegetable patch in Rhapsody in Green. She shares it with Joanne Briscoe and their children.

Alys Fowler memoir Hidden Nature is due out 6th April.