Garlic maintenance.
If you planted garlic back in mid winter then now is a good time to give your crop a 'once over'. You should have a bed or container bristling with long green, leek-like foliage. The first thing to do is to carefully hand-pull any weeds that have cropped up between your plants. When the bed is weed-free, give your garlic a good drink with diluted worm juice (if you have any) and maybe a light sprinkling of blood and bone meal (sheep pellets are a good option for vegetarians). Next, add some mulch between the garlic plants - something fairly fine like pea straw is best - so that you have a weed-suppressing, moisture-retaining layer about a couple of inches thick.
The final check involves running a wary eye up the slender stems to search for flower heads that look a bit like a tall, green elf's hat. 'Hardneck' varieties - those that produce large, easy-peel cloves with a strong flavour and a thick central stem - have a tendency to flower around now. The flowering stems they push up can reduce the size of cloves if allowed to keep growing so break them off today. Remove the pointy tip and chop the thin stems or 'scapes' and throw over a salad or use them as a base for pesto. Plants will only try to flower once and, with the offending stems removed, your garlic will continue to grow to a money-saving and productive harvest in mid to late summer. If you find no flowering stems and don't notice any in the next few weeks then it's likely you have planted a 'soft neck' variety that produces smaller cloves with thin papery skins and a milder flavour. A thin, central stem makes 'soft neck' garlic more suited to plaiting after harvest.
Protect seedlings with recycled cloches.
When plants are put out in the garden as seedlings they are vulnerable to changes in the weather. Seeing as spring is all about changes in the weather it can be worth protecting seedlings with cloches. A cloche is like a mini greenhouse, it allows in light, keeps in warmth and keeps out the worst of the weather. Depending on what type you use, a cloche can also keep plants free from the unwanted attentions of birds and slugs and snails too.
