Ron L. Engeland

A very good, very useful book - for someone intending to start a garlic farm. It's really _not_ aimed at gardeners, or anyone without a few acres to devote to garlic. At one point he discusses the major shift in time and effort that comes between dealing with a crop of "only" 1,500 pounds, and dealing with a crop of a ton or more. Yeah...my harvest _might_ hit ten pounds, if I'm lucky...and all the marketing bits near the end are kind of pointless. Though I suppose some of it could apply to other things than garlic or even produce. All that said - there's some interesting info on varieties of garlic (which differ a _lot_ - much more than people who mostly buy garlic in supermarkets would believe), info on growing methods (irrigation, mulch, storage), quite a lot about pests and diseases (though they all seem to start with yellowing leaves - as does maturity. Hmmm). Also very interesting stuff about the origin of garlic and what it evolved to want, though none of the growing stuff seems to reflect that. It's really an arid-climate plant, and should grow well in very sandy soil, because that's basically what there is in Afghanistan and the rest of the region it comes from. Very hot summers, very cold winters. And then the discussion of how to grow big, solid bulbs - keep it irrigated but not too much, let it dry at the end of the season; soft soils that don't cling; lots of green manure (fertilizer crops); etc. And again, the varieties of garlics - the ones that grow 'flower'-heads and the ones that don't (softnecks - what most of us are used to) and how they differ in growth, requirements, harvest time, storage, and flavor. There's quite a bit of good info about garlics in general; less about how to grow them in a small garden or in pots; and a lot about small farming and what farming and marketing require, which is valuable info but not to me. So for me, this is only a three-star book. I'll try to extract what's useful out of it and pass it on, maybe to someone who is thinking about starting a garlic farm (if I'm lucky enough to find such a someone).… (mehr)