Article by J

Growing your own Garlic - A couple of useful tips when growing your own Garlic:

Make sure you plant your garlic cloves at the right time. Either late autumn or late winter.  The key is to ensure that the cloves have at least 1 month of root growth below 10 degrees Celsius, which ensures that the bulb divides in to individual cloves.

By the way if the bulb does not divide in to individual cloves you can always lift them at the usual time and keep to plant in the autumn for next years crop.

Another helpful tip is if when you harvest your garlic bulbs you end up with lots of small cloves of garlic and do not like peeling and dicing them as they are so fiddly - try roasting them. Either stick them in a roasting tray with veg or tomatoes whilst roasting in the oven, when the veg are cooked let cool slightly before squeezing the garlic out of the skin – delicious and sweet and a fraction of the work and no waste! Or you can also buy a special garlic roasting dish and lid, which is of course purely optional however if you want to roast en masse it does have excellent results.

I like to use my roasted garlic in a variety of dishes including; tomato, roasted garlic and herb pizza sauce, roasted garlic and cream cheese dip, roasted tomato and garlic soup, roasted med veg salad, garlic mushrooms on toast – the possibilities are endless and are a fantastic way of using up those fiddly little cloves of home grown garlic that we do not want to waste!!

Hope these tips are useful. Happy garlicking....