Homes and Gardens / Gardening
Gardening
Sometimes you love a crop that doesn’t love you back, and for me the unrequited one has always been garlic. It’s a crop I have longed to grow well.
Not only do I use it almost every day, but it is a magic bean of a thing: you push a single clove into the ground, and come back the following summer to pull up a full bulb. But just as I hanker for garlic, garlic hankers for the Med, with its fiercely drained soils filled with sands blown across from the Sahara. Saharan sands don’t land much on the hill above Horfield prison where I have my allotment. The soil is solid clay, turning to thick cloying mud at the slightest hint of drizzle. The name Horfield is thought to have once meant, romantically, ‘muddy field’, but it isn’t just us that suffer less-than-Mediterranean soil conditions. Bristol soil generally is sticky, cold and damp, and when I have planted garlic straight into it the bulbs have grown weakly, half of them rotting away before harvest.
But we gardeners don’t generally accept the limitations presented to us by our environment, we twist and bend them towards our whims, and last year I decided to make garlic love me. Instead of planting straight into the soil I mounded it up into a ridge, and then poured along a bagful of horticultural grit and mixed it in. This created drainage where there was naturally very little, and eight months after I had pushed the cloves in along it I harvested a crop of big fat garlic that I am still eating today. Ridge up and plant now, or in the next couple of months. Bristolians too shall eat aioli to their hearts’ content.
is needed now More than ever
Image by Kirstie Young
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