GarlicAllium sativum

Garlic wants the sunniest and best-drained corner of the vegetable garden. A slightly raised bed facing south, with no shade cast in winter when the sun is low, suits it perfectly. Banish hollows where water stands after the November rains: it is excess moisture, far more than frost, that makes garlic fail in Belgium. Also avoid spots where onions, leeks or shallots have grown in the last three years, to cut short rust and white rot. After a crop of beans or cabbages, the spot is ideal.

Two to three weeks before planting, loosen the soil to twenty centimetres with a fork or a broadfork, without turning it, and carefully remove bindweed and couch grass roots. Add no fresh manure or young compost: garlic rots in it. In clay soil, mix in two buckets of coarse sand per square metre and raise the bed by ten to fifteen centimetres, or plant on ridges thirty centimetres apart. A handful of sieved wood ash per square metre provides the potash it appreciates. Then let the soil settle before planting.

Buy seed garlic, guaranteed virus-free, rather than supermarket garlic, which is often unsuited to our climate or treated. Distinguish autumn garlic, white or purple, with larger and earlier heads, from spring garlic, pink or white, which keeps longer. Separate the cloves the day before planting, keeping the six to eight largest from the outside, without removing their skin. The small cloves from the centre give tiny heads: keep them for the kitchen. If you like, soak the cloves for an hour in a warm chamomile infusion, which has antifungal properties.

In Belgium, autumn planting, from 15 October to 30 November, gives the largest heads, as garlic needs two months of cold to divide into cloves. Planting in February-March, safer in heavy soil, gives smaller bulbs that keep until the following spring. Push each clove in point upwards, three centimetres deep, every twelve to fifteen centimetres, in rows twenty-five to thirty centimetres apart. Firm with the flat of the hand and do not water. Mark the rows: emergence takes three to six weeks.

Garlic does well in a container on a sunny balcony, provided it has twenty centimetres of depth and a very free-draining mix: half potting compost, half sand or pumice, with a layer of clay pebbles at the bottom. Plant five or six cloves per thirty-centimetre container, ten centimetres apart, in October or February. Move the container out of the rain under a canopy in winter, without bringing it into the warm. Water very little, only when the compost is dry deep down. The heads will be smaller than in open ground, but perfect for green garlic in May.

The most common is planting in rich, freshly manured soil, which guarantees rot. Next comes over-fussing or watering after planting: garlic has no need of it in autumn. Many bury the cloves too deep or upside down, which delays emergence by a month. Planting supermarket cloves, often from the south, gives plants that run to flower without forming a head. Finally, replanting in the same spot every year invariably ends up establishing rust and white rot for years to come.

From planting to mid-April, garlic makes do with rain, which is always sufficient here. After that, water only if three weeks go by without rain while the bulbs are forming, in April-May, at the rate of one watering can for two metres of row, at the base, in the morning. Stop completely from mid-June, when the lower leaves yellow: moisture at the end of the crop splits the heads and compromises storage. If the summer is wet, a light tunnel or a simple sheet of plastic stretched over the rows for the last few weeks preserves the quality of the bulbs.

Garlic's narrow foliage never covers the soil, and weeds quickly get the upper hand in spring. Hoe between the rows every two weeks from March to June, and pull chickweed and speedwell by hand at the base of the plants. Avoid thick mulch, which holds moisture at the neck and shelters slugs. A thin layer of dried grass clippings or flax mulch, one centimetre deep, is tolerable in sandy soils. No fertiliser is useful; at most, a little sieved wood ash in March for potash, never nitrogen.

Hardneck varieties, such as purple or pink garlic, send up a flower stalk in June that curls into a spiral. Cut it as soon as it has looped, before the bulbil head swells, with scissors, level with the upper leaves. Removing it diverts energy to the bulb, which grows by a third. These scapes are a vegetable in their own right: sautéed in butter, in pesto or pickled, they have a mild, green flavour. On softneck garlic, such as the white autumn varieties, there is nothing to do; these are the ones you plait.

Rust, orange pustules that spot the leaves in a wet spring, is the most common disease. It does not destroy the harvest but reduces the size of the bulbs. Space the plants well, avoid stuffy shelters, cut off and remove affected leaves, spray horsetail decoction every ten days from April and harvest a little earlier if it spreads. White rot, a cottony felt at the neck, is more serious: pull up, bin and grow no alliums in that spot for eight years. Fine mesh from April to June blocks the onion fly.

In October-November, plant and mark the rows. In December-January, do nothing, other than replace cloves lifted by frost or birds. In February-March, plant spring garlic, hoe for the first time and add a little ash. In April-May, hoe every two weeks, lay mesh against the fly, watch for rust and water only in drought. In June, cut the scapes, stop all watering and harvest fresh green garlic. In July, harvest, dry and sort. In August-September, plait and store, setting the finest heads aside for planting.

The right moment comes from late June to mid-July for autumn garlic, around late July for spring garlic, when the three or four lowest leaves are dry and the upper leaves are still green. Each green leaf corresponds to a protective skin around the head: wait too long, and the skins tear, the head splits and no longer keeps. Lift with a fork in dry weather, without pulling, and do not wash the soil off with water. A simple test: dig up a head and cut it in half; if the cloves are well defined and fill the skin, it is time.

Dry the whole heads, leaves and roots still on, for two to three weeks in the shade in an airy place, hung in bunches of ten or spread on a rack. Then cut roots and stems back to two centimetres, or plait the still-supple stems of softneck varieties. Store between 10 and 18 °C, dry and in the dark, never in a damp cellar or the fridge, where garlic sprouts. Autumn garlic keeps until January, spring garlic until April-May. To bridge the late-winter gap, pot up a few cloves in December: their green leaves add flavour like chives.