Allium invasion

Unbelievers may call it stinking rose, but cooks and gardeners have long prized fragrant garlic

- Jennifer Stackhouse

The most frequently asked question about garlic is when is the best time to plant it - closely followed by when to harvest it.

The rule of thumb is you plant on the shortest day of the year and harvest on the longest: respectively, that would be mid-June and just before Christmas.

The planting window is actually much broader. Garlic is a spring-flowering bulb (much like a daffodil) so it can be planted from late autumn through to the shortest day and harvested about six months after planting.

With that sorted, it's worth keeping an eye out for cloves to plant. A lot of garlic sold in Australia for eating comes from overseas - mainly from China but also from Africa, Taiwan, New Zealand and the US.

As the imported stuff is often treated with bleaches and growth retardants to improve its appearance and shelf life, don't plant this garlic.

Instead, source cloves of locally grown organic garlic, available at growers' markets, local produce stores and garlic festivals (see box opposite page) as well as online.

Growing organic garlic in your own garden makes it readily available and free of unwanted chemicals. Each clove planted will yield a head of garlic with around 10-20 individual cloves.

If you have plenty of garden space to grow your own garlic, it's reasonably easy to work out how much garlic you use and how much to plant to meet your needs.

Add about 10 per cent to that number so you have garlic to plant the following year from your own supplies. Garlic can be grown only from cloves. Plants may flower, but the flowers produced are sterile and don't form seeds.

VARIETIES AND SPECIES

Garlic is closely related to onions, leeks, chives, shallots and others of the Allium genus.