Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden: Garlic

Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden

Welcome to the Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden website! We are committed to organic gardening. Using the best practices from the Victorian days (i.e. lots of horse manure) and knowledge gleaned from the Ryton Organic Gardens we have set out to tame our Warwickshire clay. It’s all about sustainability, so as well as organic gardening, we’re always looking to better ways to work with our environment.

On this site you can find out about our history and the projects we are working on. You can come visit the garden and learn about organic gardening. Follow our blog to see what’s on our mind in the garden this month.

For the first 8 years all the work was carried out by just the two of us. Now we have help and are passing on our knowledge to students on the WRAGS (Work and Retrain As a Gardener Scheme).

We also find time to be involved with the WOT2Grow Community Orchard in Tysoe and have planted a 3 acre wood close to Tysoe, just over the border in Oxfordshire with a grant from the Woodland Trust.

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Garlic

Now is the time to harvest the garlic, earlier than you would for onions.

We plant garlic in October, they need the cold weather and frost to help form the individual cloves, although this does not work 100% of the time. We dug them up a couple of weeks ago and left them to dry. With this very warm weather we were able to leave the harvested garlic lying on the soil in the sun to dry out. Rain forecast last night so brought them into the shed, it rained for less than 5 minutes! The garlic was almost dry so bundled them up and have hung them in the greenhouse to complete drying so they will store. Some of the varieties are soft neck so they could be plaited. “Very French” said our daughter! The others are less photogenic bundles.

Despite the dry weather the garlic is a good size this year and we have harvested 139 bulbs including 27 Elephant garlic. These are bigger and taste more like leeks than garlic and delicious roasted.

A good stock to last through the winter and also plenty to make the garlic spray for hostas, young veg and other plants to deter the slugs and snails.

Tysoe Walled Kitchen Garden