Today’s offering involves stripping and hard liquor. Before you start to flag the post let me elaborate. This is a tale of two garlic-planting methods.
A source suggested convincingly garlic cloves need to be stripped of their husks and steeped overnight in a baking soda solution then bathed in vodka before planting. How could I resist? After all, I had that vodka left over from my foray into Lime Extract. And just look:
I felt like a sort of open-air barkeep at Rick’s Cafe.
The instructions advised soaking the garlic in water to which is added a heaping tablespoon of baking soda and liquid seaweed fertilizer (to protect against fungus and give it a nutrient boost). The next day, a short soak in vodka or rubbing alcohol to kill pests/eggs and any remaining disease right before planting. Well, okay, why not?
Here is how I set up a new garlic bed. The planting box is tacked together from an old, larger raised bed and placed on grocery bags to delay the bermuda grass invasion (I ran out of my usual cardboard):
Wet newspapers down:
Here I planted my “control” cloves in this highly unscientific experiment–5 unpeeled, unsoaked cloves about in the center of the bed:
And filling out the bed, here are the peeled-and-inebriated cloves (30 of them):
The (partial) results:
The unpeeled cloves came up faster with a 100% survival rate:
Several weeks later, the unpeeled cloves (foreground) were still looking stronger than the peeled, soaked cloves, some of which didn’t come up at all:
Now, (2/10/09) tucked under some leaves for the winter:
I can still see a difference in the vigor of the unpeeled cloves. The plants are larger. I will see when I harvest them if the unpeeled cloves are the clear winners. At this point in the trial I wish I had left 30 cloves unpeeled and peeled 5 cloves for the soaking experiment.
I am not knocking the soaking/peeling method–this is just how it did for me this one time and I am no expert by any means. If the cloves I planted had any type of fungus or disease then I may have reaped the benefits of soaking, so even if the unsoaked cloves do yield the best heads of garlic there could still be a reason to consider this method. So far, though, in the future I will save the vodka for other purposes, get out of the way, and let nature take over next time.
I’m out to the garden to plant some spring garlic. I’ll report on those later.
Play it again, Sam.
