Ruud Kleinpaste: Planting garlic - do it earlier than you think

Allium Rust on garlic has become quite an issue in the past 10 years. Not just in Canterbury, where I live, but in many places of New Zealand. 

It’s a fungal disease that never was that problematic in “the old days”. I used to grow heaps of garlic in Auckland and Christchurch, but slowly, stuff started to become troublesome. 

People complain that this fungal disease strikes in late winter/early spring, and the only thing that stops it from hammering the garlic plants is by regular spraying with copper or copper/sulphur fungicides (organics!). 

“Regular” might be as frequent as every fortnight! The easiest way to identify the rust attack is the yellow pustules that cover the leaf surfaces. 

Rust is transmitted by air movement – the spores float with the wind and can travel from great distances. If you are in a densely populated area with many gardeners that grow onions, shallots, leeks, and other Allium species, the spores will be everywhere. 

Another thing that seems to cause Allium Rust is by having too much moisture in the soil – keep it as dry as you can. 

Traditionally, garlic used to be planted on the shortest day (third week of June) and harvested around the longest day (just before Christmas), but I’ve done some trials for the last half a dozen years or so to bring those dates forward by at least a month and a half. 

With rather little success, to be frank – I still need to spray regularly and when I am on the road and miss one of the sprays, the leaves will turn that yucky yellow-orange with the rust. 

I tried growing inside my old tunnel house (drier conditions and no fungal spores having access to the young plants) – now that made a bit of a difference! 

This year I decided to go inside my brand-new tunnel house. A week ago (on the 4th of May) I planted a few narrow beds of garlic in various lengths between other plants (including my late-comer tomato plants). 

Keeping the tunnel house openings closed as much as possible will reduce the fungal spores floating into the tunnel house, and this will avoid infections right from the moment I plant the garlic. 

Remember to keep the garlic reasonably dry – it all works to keep your crop healthy. If you do find some yellow spores on the leaves, spray with some copper/sulphur fungicides. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks at Me Rue.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Climb past is our man in the garden. Good morning, sir.

Speaker 3 (00:17):
A very good morning to you. Jack.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Is everything okay, everything is very good, thank you. Everything
is yet really well. We have the leaves are turning
at our place. We've got a plane tree in the backyard.
It's so nigh. I do love, you know what. I
love being able to experience seasons. I know that sounds
like a really cheesy thing to say, but I really love.
I love feeling the difference in seasons. And it's been

(00:40):
the weather an all cline has gone from that, you know,
it gets really sort of humid and sticky and things
over the end of summer and it's just got that's
the beautiful Christmas in the year. At the moment, it's
been almost South Island ESK. I would say, yeah, And
the leaves are turning, you know, I said, I tried
to impress this on my wife. I said, look, I said,
look at that tree. This time last week, none of

(01:01):
those leaves had fallen, and look at them all now
they're everywhere. Look at them. And she was she didn't care.
She I got on the wrong. You know, she wasn't
in the kind of poet moment that I was.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
Yeah, anyway, and guess what I just I just taken
some photos of exactly that because I think I'm going
to do something about these colors for next week's program thing,
and I thought it'll be nice and also how you
can get some really good compost out of it.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
But it's another story anyway, Okay, Hey, garlic, anyway to
get it earlier?

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Listen, everybody always says you put garlic in the ground
at the shortest day and you harvested on the longest day.
And if the if I've heard ten year old nonsense
like that, then I go like, hang in there, We've
got to do something else. And to be quite honest,
we've got a rust that came in about ten years ago,
which is the alien rust, which really started to do something.

(01:52):
And that's the rust that actually makes the garlic quite
yellow and buck bucky and things like that, especially in Canterbury.
And so what I found out is that if you
start earlier, you probably can do some good damage to
prevent that, you know, to stop the damage happening, so

(02:14):
you prevent it. And it's as simple as that. So
what I tend to do now is I've just done
it earlier this week, i am doing it at this
time of the year, and I'm going on till maybe
November be a bit earlier with the harvest, et cetera.
So that is the general general idea. First. Yeah, First

(02:34):
of all, if you do get some of this alium
rust on your plants, the least you can do is
do some copper or copper sulfur fung sites that you
can spray, even lime sulfur if you like. And if
you do that regularly, and regularly is every two weeks
or so, you might be able to control it a bit.
But boy, it's difficult, you know, really really difficult. So

(02:58):
the air moves the pores of this particular fungus through
your garden, that's how it works. So if it then
lands on your leaves, the leaves go yellow and oh gunyah,
very hard to stop. So what I did in the
past was I started growing this stuff in my old

(03:19):
tunnel house, which by the way, had a bit of
mesh at the bottom, and it was still leaking some spores,
but it was a bit less. Now I've got a
brand new tunnel that is on the bottom all clear,
nothing can go through. So I'm keeping my tunnel house
now closed. Nothing goes in there. And that's how you're

(03:40):
going to do it. You will get much better success.
Keep an eye on it.

Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yeah, okay, great, Yeah, thank you sir. You have a
great weekend. Welcome and we will catch you against you.
That is Rue Climbhat our man.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
In the gun.

Speaker 1 (03:54):
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