We love to share what we love... and we love garlic and shallots! You'll find gorgeous seed garlic & shallots listed here every late Summer/early Fall. And don't forget the fertility... our Organic Garlic and Shallot Fertilizer has specially blended diverse amendments to feed both our soil and our alliums, and in turn, us!
Transcript: Garlic is one of the heaviest feeders in your garden. And it’s so easy to grow. But one of the biggest mistakes is simply not feeding it enough. And so I’d love to share with you a few tips so that you can have the most beautiful abundant garlic this season.
Certainly in the fall when you’re planting it, and I can’t wait for it to be fall and showing you exactly what we do. But feel free to put on lots of compost in the fall, lots of deciduous leaves that are finely chopped, incorporated into the soil and or even mulched with those shredded deciduous leaves. And then in the spring, early on, it’s really important to feed them with a high nitrogen source. Bloodmeal is one of our favorites. And so that just gives them that boost of vegetative growth. And that is the key thing to help them grow early on in the season. Nitrogen is way more available in cooler soils generally than a lot of the other macronutrients and other micronutrients. So by the time it’s warming up, at that point, we start using fish emulsion to feed our garlic. And fish emulsion, you can spray on the leaves, you can also drench on the soil. And on our farm, we do both: we primarily foliar feed. Although in a lot of ways it’s easier to drench. And if you’re going to foliar feed or drench either way, you want to take one ounce of your beautiful fish emulsion and dilute it into one gallon of water. And with that proper dilution more is not more, don’t be tempted to put in more than that ounce. You can burn the plants and you can also attract animals with that dilution if it’s stronger.
So with an ounce of fish emulsion to an ounce of water, you can either spray it on the leaves — just making sure it’s not in the middle of the day because the water droplets will burn your leaves. Isn’t it wild that leaves will actually uptake nutrients as well as roots? But it’s also very easy and very applicable to simply drench, pouring that liquid right on top of the root system itself. And that’s another perfectly marvelous way to make lots of micro and macro nutrients available to your plants.
Starting early spring, we start spraying with fish emulsion, and every 10 days to every two weeks refeeding them. And you’ll notice on the edge of these leaves that browning there are these lovely blue green leaves and then at the margins, they turn yellow, they can turn brown, you can see at this end, it’s actually brown and crispy. And that is a sign that they’re hungry. And to some degree, this is inevitable. This is perfectly normal and hard to abate. But it can be very dramatic.
If your garlic is very hungry, you’ll see inches of the your leaves being sacrificed to this where they’re actually it’ll start on the lower most leaves. And they’re literally mining their own nutrients taking nutrients from this tip back down into the stem and sending it up into their new growth. So it’s perfectly normal to see this but if it’s any more dramatic than this, know that feeding and drenching with your emulsion is one of your very best options.
So have fun feeding your garlic this season friends, and then have fun feeding yourself garlic.
