Or rather, a Tale of Two Garlic BEDS.
This year, I didn’t plant as much garlic as I have in years past. The kids are both at college, and while Tom and I are very fond of garlic and cook with it nearly every night, making two portions rather than four has changed my planting schemes considerably (for every crop, not just garlic). I decided to put the garlic in our two fire-ring beds this winter and see how it worked out.
Last summer, one of these beds held basil (a riotous overflowing abundant crop of basil!), and the other held cilantro - which grew, then quickly flowered, and set seed, as cilantro tends to do. Last winter, both of these beds held sweet pea flowers.
I planted the garlic cloves in both beds at the same time this past October. Both get the same amount of drip irrigation. Both have very similar conditions regarding sun exposure, particularly in winter when our chitalpa tree loses its leaves. But the garlic crop in one bed is much greener, and much further along, than the other.
The top bed held the basil, which I either harvested before it had a chance to set seed, or did set seed but hasn’t germinated, because it simply can’t in cold temperatures. The bottom bed has its third or fourth crop of cilantro at this point, because it definitely set seed, and it can germinate well in cooler temps.
The cilantro bed not only looks prettier, full and abundant and rich, the garlic is also further along, taller and greener than the basil bed. The soil in this bed is also darker and richer than the soil in the basil bed.
What’s going on here? It’s all down to the wonderful synergy that happens when two or more crops grow together. One might think that the garlic growing alone would do better - after all, it has no competition for nutrients, light, or water - but that’s obviously not the case.
The bed with both garlic and cilantro is doing so well because the two species are sharing resources. Mycelium (strands of fungi) are connecting between the roots of the plants, and are shuttling resources between the two. Even more importantly, the garlic and cilantro are feeding two different colonies of microbiota in the soil. Each is photosynthesizing and pumping sugars down through their root systems to feed all the microscopic critters, and that means double the food. It’s also likely that specific species show up to eat from the roots of each kind of plant. It’s a beautiful symbiosis that results in TWO great crops, rather than just one.
My guess is that I’m going to be able to harvest the garlic that is growing with the cilantro earlier than the one in the old basil bed. It will be interesting to see if my hypothesis is correct.