Grow Great Garlic

by Bee Mohn

Farmer Rich Sisti gets ready to plant garlic and shallots at Catalpa Ridge Farm in Wantage, New Jersey. Sisti owns the Community Supported Agriculture farm and is also DIG IT!'s "Ask DIG IT!" veggie wizard.

He places a basket of smelly bulbs on the trunk of his car - "a pile of alliums" - elephant garlic, small garlic bulbs for greens, shallots, Russian Giant hardneck garlic and onion sets. He'll plant them this month along with 60 other garlic varieties. He'll divvy up the hoard next year between CSA deliveries, personal eating, selling at special markets, and saving some for next year's seed.

Plant the entire bulb of shallots; don't break them apart. Also plant the whole bulb for garlic greens. It'll send up seven or eight plants. Elephant garlic, hardnecks and softnecks are broken into cloves and planted. Softneck garlic is braidable and stores better. Hardneck has more flavor.

Small cloves beget small bulbs, and large cloves beget large bulbs, he says, so plant the larger cloves and eat the smaller ones - or plant them for greens.

There are two ways to plant garlic: rows and raised beds.

ROWS: Plant cloves four to five inches deep to prevent them from being heaved out of the ground during November's freeze/thaw soil action. Plant six inches apart. Cultivation method determines the amount of space between rows.

RAISED: Mark a four-foot by six-inch board every six inches like lines on a ruler; flip it over and mark the other side. Place the board across the bed and plant bulbs at each mark. Flip the board over as you plant down the length of the bed. This allows an intensive planting six inches in all directions. "A raised area won't lay wet. Garlic rots and stays small in wet soil," he says. "Plus the soil tends to warm up earlier in the spring."

After the garlic's in the ground, mulch. "I get hay early in the season and leave it out all summer so it gets nice and wet so the seeds sprout. The bales normally dry out in June and July and the plants die. Then I have nice, clean hay. If I mulch with hay right from the barn, I get weed seeds."

Another trick Sisti has up his garlic sleeve is heavily over-seeding with oats as soon as planting is done. The oats will sprout quickly if wet - if it doesn't rain often, then water -- and will die in December or January. "That'll give you an instant cover of hay." But in dealing with nature, it could backfire. One year it stayed warm in winter and Sisti had a mess of oat plants and roots crowding out his bulbs. Consult your fortune teller.

The Reward: Eat garlic straight through the season - first the greens, then the scape or "curls," then the finished bulbs.

In spring, cut the tops of the small bulbs destined as garlic greens and "use them like chives, or wait and use the whole plant when it gets bigger, just like a green onion."

In June and July, the regular garlic bulbs will send up a seed stalk (scape). Break it off and eat. This helps the plant produce a bigger bulb.

June through August, when the plants start to die and lose their bottom leaves and have only five or six green leaves left, they should be ready to harvest. The remaining green leaves become the bulb's wrapper. If left in the ground too long, the leaves die and the bulb becomes naked. "It's still good to eat but it looks awful," says Sisti.

Dig the bulbs to check if the garlic's ready. "If it's a nice garlic, it's ready to go," he says.

"Garlic is good to eat fresh when it's mild and juicy, but drying develops flavor." Hang the plants, or lay them on screen, in a dark, dry place.

Farmer Rich packs a lot in on his one-acre of land scratched out of the wild surroundings and where bear sometimes watch him work.

Jerusalem artichokes (not from Jerusalem, nor are they artichokes) are an overlooked delight to plant in October and November. They're many things in one: ornamental, delicious and perennial.

They are really sunflowers and are also known as Sunchokes (Helianthus tuberosa). In the fall, the six-foot plants are covered with five-inch yellow sunflowers.

Plant the tubers in the fall in moist soil. Harvest the next fall, but dig a few up to check -- they should be seven to eight-inches long. The plants regenerate every year because when harvesting, some tubers are inevitably missed and the potato-like eyes send up new plants.

Sisti planted his chokes eight years ago. He says they're hard to kill if you want to get rid of them, but constant mowing will do it.

Supposedly good for diabetics, the starch in sunchokes doesn't break down into sugar like the starch in potatoes. Some pasta makers incorporate sunchoke flour.

Harvest after the leaves die down - around mid-October. Dig them; eat them any way you like them. Store the thin-skinned, red or white tubers wrapped in plastic in the fridge.

Sisti picks kale leaves right through the season and says that it and other veggies in the same family taste even better after the first frost.

"Kale and chard over-winter, depending on what February is like. If it's 65Ă‚Â°, the plants will start to grow and then a 10Ă‚Â° night will kill them. Last year there was a snow cover so it was nice." He cuts them down to the stem during the first two weeks of September. "If you whack the kale plant early enough, you get lots of nice tender new growth."

Red cabbage produces through the fall. He cut off the main head in September and new heads then budded off the stem. He broke off all but one, which now grows into a nice head. Since he grows organically, he likes to grow red cabbage. "The green worms stick out like a sore thumb. The birds are always around eating them." Plus, the weeds he hasn't had time to pull are good habitat for the wasps that live there and also eat the cabbage worms.

WHERE TO FIND THEM: Onion sets: hard to find right now, but Farmer Rich says to find them on the web. Try www.groworganic.com Exotic, fun garlic: The 2nd Annual Garden State Garlic Gathering. See Calendar of Events. On sunchoke tubers: "They're usually very expensive because once you buy them, you never buy them again."

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