top bar

Oct 24, 2013

Planting Garlic

After reading Dracula by Bram Stoker I had no idea what to make for my Craft Book Club craft! The one thing I kept thinking about was garlic and I had been wanting to grow some anyway so planting garlic was my 'craft'.

Planting garlic
Planting garlic

I really wanted to grow some Elephant Garlic (which isn't technically garlic), but everywhere online wouldn't ship to Idaho. After doing a little research I found out that I am living in a quarantine area. To protect the commercial onion industry, Southern Idaho is has a white rot quarantine zone. If you plant garlic that hasn't been certified (garlic from the grocery store) there can be some hefty fines and jail time.

To grow a new variety of garlic in the area, every clove needs to be sent to a lab at the University of Idaho to be tested. This gets expensive because a lot of the cloves that test negative for white rot won't actually produce a plant because of damage caused during testing. There are some local garlic farmers that have several varieties, but none of them are Elephant Garlic so I ended up buying a Early Italian bulb.

My bulb of garlic had nine cloves that have been planted outside in my raised beds next to my rhubarb. I hope that the neighborhood squirrels who love moving tulip bulbs to random places in the yard find garlic appalling and will leave these cloves alone so they will start growing this spring (and all be in one place)!

Our next book is Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the garlic, even though I am not in a quarantine area... It will be fun to see how it does in containers.

    ReplyDelete

NOTE: To get a faster response avoid commenting as "Anonymous". Your message is less likely to be overlooked as spam if you enter a name!