Garlic is probably the most Sisyphean story I have here on the farm.

I planted our first crop of garlic here, late in the season and the day after we took possession of the property in 2019, using seed I’d grown the previous year in the garden of our rental.

It did well, and in 2020 I used the majority of it to plant a really huge bed of garlic.

That was doing great until a big pig came through. We set up traps and eventually got a dog to deter the pig. But thankfully it mostly rooted around the plants, and I managed to pull up a pretty decent harvest.

2021 is when The Troubles began. Setting my sights on becoming a seed garlic grower, I planted four very large beds by hand with over 1,000 cloves of seed stock I’d lovingly built up over the previous 3 years. I sang to it, and tended it with care.

And it all got hit terribly with rust.

The harvest was meagre, and yet, I persisted. I rescued what I could and focussed on keeping my strains going in 2022. Rust again made an appearance on this smaller crop, but I still did pretty well out of it.

In 2023, I tried again, trying one more time to supply in some capacity. And again I got hit so badly with rust that I simply gave up. I took 2024 off and let the seed lines die.

Or so I thought.

Last season

In late autumn, I noticed a bulb we’d missed during harvest had sprouted. I couldn’t resist. So I transplanted it, splitting the cloves and giving them some space, mulch, and a few extra nutrients.

Three of those plants absolutely thrived. I harvested three rust-free, fairly decent plants before Christmas and left them to cure.

In fact, didn’t touch them again until this week, when I planted 24 cloves of Takahue garlic—the one variety that survived the purge, against the odds.

The bulbs had had kept well, and the cloves were just beginning to sprout.

2025

I planted my garlic cloves at 30cm spacing. That’s more than usual, and I’m hoping that giving them as much airflow as I can will reduce any rust.

Each clove was planted with a sprinkle of lime and blood and bone in a bed that has never grown garlic—or any other allium—before.

It turns out, good garlic is expensive as all heck. I haven’t had to buy it in 7 or 8 years and it was a bit of a shock!

From here on out, my goal is just growing for personal use, as well as a few bulbs for my Dad for Christmas. I’m not aiming to supply anyone. I won’t be going big.

Just enough to ensure the seed line continues into the future, and I don’t have to buy it.

The bed is netted with bird net because I cannot keep my chickens from getting into the garden. So this offers the plants a bit of protection from being dug up again. That’s about all I have it in me to do.

Garlic is a crop that’s always going to affect my anxiety because I definitely have some form of garlic trauma from 2021 in particular. Pulling up 1,000 little failures does that to you.

But even though I tried to give up, apparently I just can’t. And so, another year pushing this rock begins.