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  • From: Nan Hildreth <NanHildreth AT riseup.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>, Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Treating Garlic Seed
  • Date: Thu, 07 Oct 2010 13:09:09 -0500

Sorry, my mistake. He soak whole clove in rubbing alcohol or 100 proof vodka for 3 to 5 minutes and then plant immediately.

Details of his advice. :

We soak the cloves for 15 to 30 minutes in a solution containing liquid seaweed and some liquid humate if you have it available at the rate of one tablespoon each per gallon of water. If there is any hint of that black, sooty powder that often plagues garlic, we add a tablespoon of baking soda to inhibit fungal growth. It seems to give our garlic a good boost. If you have some garlic that doesn't look or smell right and you suspect there's something wrong with it but you insist on planting it anyway, you might try soaking it for 5 minutes or so in rubbing alcohol. Alcohol seems to help overcome a great many problems. For long term soil health, it is best not to plant anything but healthy cloves.http://www.gourmetgarlicgardens.com/wwinter.htm


The night before your soil is ready to plant, break bulbs apart into cloves and soak the separated cloves overnight in water containing one heaping tablespoon of baking soda per gallon (also adding a TBSP of liquid seaweed, would be even better) or until clove covers loosen around the cloves (about 16 hours). Just before planting, remove the cloves from the water, drain and dip the cloves in a dish of rubbing alcohol for 3 to 5 minutes, long enough for the alcohol to penetrate the clove covers, and plant immediately. http://www.gourmetgarlicgardens.com/growinst.htm

I then soak it in alcohol for a few minutes just before planting to try to kill any unseen hitchhikers, like mites, stowing away between the wrappers. One of the reasons to soal the garlic so long is to loosen the clove covers so that the alcohol can penetrate the clove covers and kill any mites lurking inside the clove covers.

If you plant garlic cloves that already have adult mites in them, tucked in between the clove and the clove covers, they will eat the surface layers of the cloves, they or their eggs will survive the winter and reproduce all spring long and your next years crop will perish. The best way I know of to deal with this problem is to soak the seperated cloves in water overnight to loosen up the clove covers and then soak the cloves for a few minutes in alcohol to kill the adult mites at planting time. I don't know if the alcohol soaking kills any eggs that may be present or not. In my experience, contaminated garlic soaked like this does much better than contaminated garlic not soaked.

These precautions may not get everything, but from my experiences and experiments, they help a lot. For a few years during the 90s, I tried various different preplanting soaking solutions and compared them to cloves from the same bulbs that had no special treatment, just planted. In every case, the treated cloves out-performed the untreated ones in that they were larger and healthier. The ones that did the best were the ones that had the most ingredients in the soakings. The ones that were best among the ones that receives only a single soaking were the ones soaked in alcohol. In another interesting observation, some cloves were completely peeled while others were left intact and they received the same soakings as the others and in almost every case, the bare naked cloves out performed the intact ones, from which I infer the presence of pathogens or pests in the clove covers - but who has time to peel all those cloves?

http://www.gourmetgarlicgardens.com/diseases.htm

At 12:09 PM 10/7/2010, stonecirclefarm tds.net wrote:
Why only the base, I wonder?

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 11:03 AM, Nan Hildreth <<mailto:NanHildreth AT riseup.net>NanHildreth AT riseup.net> wrote:
Dip the base of each bulb in alcohol just before planting says Gourmet Garlic Gardens, a Texas seed supplier.


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Make Soil, End Global Warming

"We could end global warming if we restored the fertility in the soils in the state of California." Dr. Elaine Ingham, www.soilfoodweb.com

"...global warming can be reversed by restoring biodiversity in the soils and in the ocean. ... There is enough land to sequester this carbon and it could be done in a decade or two. ... Now that the Oil Age is coming to an end, we are entering the Soil Age. " http://groups.google.com/group/soil-age

"... a 1.6% increase in organic content of soils humans manage would restore atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to normal." says Allan Yeomans in http://www.youtube.com/user/AllanYeomans1#p/a/u/0/-o2N6vJDLpE Free download of his book http://www.yeomansplow.com.au/priority-one-contents.htm




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