When at the start of this year I’ve committed myself to growing a wide variety of new food-giving plants in our garden, I knew I was up for many surprises and even failures. But what I’m about to confess to you now was a failure like no other, and that’s because it happened where I’d never expect it. It’s also my most favourite failure so far. Read on to find out why.
I was always encouraged to grow garlic wherever I lived, even in a pot. It’s easy to plant separated garlic cloves and it tends to be very forgiving in growing, which is why many people consider it to be a fail-proof crop. We’ve done it for several years. Two years ago in the autumn it was one of the first things I’ve planted in our first newly set up raised bed. It grew marvellously over winter under a net cloche to protect it from hungry pests and in July last year we had a nice harvest of home grown hard-neck garlic.
How NOT TO grow it:
Last autumn the same bed had been taken by a more permanent fixture of sage bushes and so the garlic had to be planted elsewhere. A little piece of border was added to our gradually expanding enterprise, freshly cleared of unwanted ornamental plants, weeds and sweet peas. It is not a raised bed and the soil there is our regular clay soil which is found everywhere in our garden and in the broad locality.
The clearing required the heaviest digging and forking I’ve ever done, largely due to the desire to remove deep root systems as well as tiny bulbs of ever spreading snowdrops (a task I now attest is virtually impossible to achieve). Lump by lump, I separated the heavy clay in search for more little bulbs. When I was (seemingly) done, I incorporated into the spot large amounts of organic matter, which was at the time some lovely farmyard manure. Soon after 15 garlic cloves sat nicely tucked in their position, about three inches apart, under a net cloche, full of hope for the next season. It was October.
The garlic grew nice long leafy tops over the winter and so things looked promising, but as spring unfolded I kept pulling out more leaves of snowdrop protruding from the ground, right next to the green garlic, which at this stage looked very alike. At that time I decided to plant some walking onions in the same spot, next to the garlic. I also planted two left-over sets of the same onion in amongst some strawberries in a no-dig raised bed, just as an afterthought really.
By mid May it was clear the 14 walking onions planted in the dug border would not make it, even though the two planted in the raised bed were thriving. That was the first warning sign something was up in that border. A sign I ignored because, even though the onions did next to no growth, the garlic looked quite healthy and happy. I concluded I must have bought a bad batch of onion sets, or perhaps I let them dry out too much before planting.
But it only took two more weeks. Suddenly the entire lot of garlic got rapidly infested with black aphids. I removed the pest manually with a damp cloth but it proved to be too late - the garlic remained half-fainted in the ground for two more weeks but never recovered it’s vigour. It needed taking out prematurely, before it died altogether.
Pest infestations, aside of being a threat and a nuisance, also tend to reveal what we might have missed before, that is the hidden weakness in the plant. How the pest itself knows which plants are the weaker, more susceptible ones? Perhaps you can tell me. But the aphids visibly favoured my weaker broad beans (ie. the ones that suffered the winter a bit). Though it is not uncommon for aphids to like all alliums, I’ve never had aphids on garlic before and here it was, barely alive in front of my very own eyes.
How to eat it:
Well, I had to be satisfied with small, hardly developed garlic heads, with cloves so tiny it was difficult to separate them out. Now the good news is you can eat it at such an immature stage and even before the cloves are formed, when it is more akin to leek and goes well in any dish you’d normally use leek for. A slightly garlicky leek, might I mention. Still delicious and worth enjoying! Mine went into a stir fry, cloves eventually squeezed out of the head by hand.
Lessons learnt:
There was another element of surprise. Some time after clearing the soil of the garlic, I stuck a basic Ph measuring kit (you can get it in any gardening store) about 6 inches deep into the spot. Astonishingly, it showed a PH of between 5 and 4, which is indeed very, very acidic. Most veg grows in Ph of 7 (neutral) to 6 (slightly acidic), and anything more acidic than that prevents appropriate nutrient absorption. My border was fertile, but the plants could not take up their food from it. I went on to test the soil Ph all around the garden. Everywhere else was between 6 and 7.
In hindsight and some research effort later, I can identify two possible reasons for this unfortunate high soil acidity in a small lonely spot, though neither of them would be likely to create it on its own:
1. Water-logging due to compaction (as a result of heavy digging)
The garlic bed happens to be one of the lowest lying points of our garden, though the sloping is hardly noticeable (you can only really see it on the property ordnance survey maps). Digging up soil can unfortunately make it more compact in the end, which in turn leads to waterlogging. In the rainy winter we’ve had, this heavy clay spot was constantly wet. On the other hand, leaving the soil undisturbed, with its internal structure of roots, worm canals, and fungal networks intact, preserves its permeability as water finds its way down through to deeper levels.
Lesson 1: Mulch rather than dig, particularly if the ground is already wet. It may sound lazy, but the results are clear.
2. Decaying organic matter
I will forever wonder if the onions that failed to grow in this small border section created the acidity as they decayed in situ, or did they fail because of the acidity already being there and added further to it? I’ll never know for sure. All I can be sure of is that the sets were otherwise viable - they grew strong elsewhere in a raised bed and not a single pest sat on them.
Lesson 2: Testing soil PH before sowing is worthwhile if you don’t want disappointments, particularly if growing on an old site.
Lesson 3: Tackle pests without delay. This is often more easily said than done, but it must be acknowledged that with pests which suck the plants juices and multiply quickly, time is of essence.
And finally, most importantly,
lesson 4: Don’t just prepare to fail. Welcome it. That’s a hard one for me. But as much as we all love to succeed, it is our failures that help us gain and retain the most knowledge. I had never considered soil PH up until this year, thinking it an unlikely problem particularly at a site where things grew well before. It took a fail-proof crop to fail to get me interested and now I know a lot more, and will not easily forget it!
On this note let me leave you with my best wishes: may your successes be great and many and may your failures be insightful! I’d be thrilled to hear your thoughts.
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