Q: Everybody’s impatient–and wants to know when to harvest their garlic. How do you know when garlic is ready to pull, since you can’t see the bulb below the ground, of course?
A. Garlic dries from the bottom up, so you’ll see leaves go brown gradually starting near the soil level. When four or five leaves (or five or six, some experts say—maybe we should compromise on five?) are still green, experiment by lifting a couple of heads. You don’t want to let them go all brown in the ground, the way you can with onions. Here’s the whole story on when and how to harvest garlic.
Q: Ellen wrote in to ask: I didn’t feed my shrubs and trees in spring, because the weather was just so crazy – I never got to it. Can I feed them now?
A. No food for those woody plants, I’m afraid, at least if you are (as I am) in an area where there’s a real winter sometime in your garden’s future. Encouraging trees and shrubs to put on fresh, tender new growth now, when they should be working on hardening off the growth they pushed in spring, would leave the newest parts vulnerable to dieback when frost does come. Late winter or earliest spring is generally the best time for fertilizing them.
Q. Readers have had lots of questions lately about poor
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