At first glance, it seems that growing good garlic is quite difficult. Many believe that this culture is very picky about growing and planting conditions. In fact, everything is much simpler. Knowing a few tricks, you can grow excellent garlic without much effort.
Need to change cultures
Garlic precursors play a huge role in the cultivation of this product. Almost all vegetable crops need fruit rotation. Thus, the soil is not depleted, but on the contrary, it is enriched with all the necessary elements. An important detail when choosing the predecessors of a particular vegetable is the length of the plant's root. Every year in the same area it is recommended to plant vegetables with different root lengths. Thus, each of the plants depletes the soil at different levels.
Garlic has a rather short root, which means that the predecessor for garlic must be with a long root system. An excellent option can be a vegetable such as zucchini. It has a very powerful root system. Besidesbefore planting zucchini, as a rule, the earth is saturated with potassium. And the soil for garlic also needs a lot of potassium. An important factor when planting garlic is the acidity of the soil: this vegetable grows only in non-acidic soil.
Fertilizer before planting garlic
It is not recommended to use organic fertilizer before planting garlic. This vegetable is very sensitive to various fungal diseases. Together with such a fertilizer, many different fungi enter the soil that can harm the heads of garlic. Use of mineral fertilizers in small quantities is allowed. Many gardeners insist that garlic precursors are fertilized with organic matter. For example, organic fertilizer is brought to a plot of land and cucumbers or zucchini are planted. In July, these vegetables are harvested and the land is allowed to rest. About a few weeks before the start of a cold snap, garlic can be planted in this area.
Bad precursors of garlic
Not all vegetables can be garlic precursors. It is not recommended to plant garlic where onions or carrots have grown before. Onions belong to the same family as garlic and deplete the soil of the necessary elements. As for the carrot, although it belongs to a different family and has a longer root, it depletes the soil very much. If you plant garlic after carrots and onions, the harvest will be very poor. It is also undesirable to plant it after potatoes and beets.
Good precursor plants
The best precursors for garlic are cereals and winter cropsherbs. As a rule, oats, barley, wheat, alfalfa, clover have a good root system. Thanks to this, they extract useful elements from deep layers of soil to higher ones. The use of cereals and winter grasses as precursors is called "green manure". After the crops grow by 15-20 cm, the site is dug up along with the regrown plants, and the earth is prepared for planting garlic.
Besides the fact that after cereals the soil is saturated with many elements, a powerful root system clogs various kinds of weeds and weeds. Another advantage of cereals is that they kill various kinds of fungi and other pathogens. Thus, the use of grain crops and winter grasses not only saturates the soil with all the necessary elements, but also disinfects it.
When to plant garlic
As a rule, garlic is planted either in early spring or autumn. It depends on the variety and the expected harvest date. Spring garlic (also called spring garlic) ripens longer than winter garlic and has a lower yield. However, such garlic is stored much better. The predecessors of spring garlic are grain and winter grasses. And squash, zucchini, cabbage are the precursors of garlic for winter planting.
For spring garlic, for example, at the end of August, a piece of land is planted with wheat. After germination by 15-20 cm, it is mowed and the area is dug up. The earth rests and winters in this form, and in early spring on this site you can startplanting spring garlic.
Winter garlic is planted in areas where garlic precursors grew before winter. It is very important that before planting a vegetable, the earth rests in a dug-up form for at least a few weeks.
Following the above tips, you can grow a good harvest of garlic on your site.
