so it's now spring in the garden and as you can see the garlic's really got off to a great start this is the elephant garlic at the back which is looking pretty humongous as you'd expect and these are our smaller perhaps more flavors some garlic varieties in front but not only is the garlic growing well the weeds have turned up as well as the soil warms everything is suddenly growing because we've had a lot of winter rain the soil on the top of the bed is kind of compacted it's formed a crust now the problem with that is that when it rains in the coming months and that's when the garlic really needs that moisture as it grows instead of the rain soaking in it hits the surface and it runs off so we need to get rid of the weeds we need to break up the surface compaction we need to give these plants an extra boost of nutrients right now so they can grow really well in the coming months and we need to help them conserve moisture now this is a long-handled her you can see it's got a blade at the front here it's not too wide so it can go in between our garlic plants the great thing about it is though that it's long enough to work on a reasonably sized bed so you just get that blade under the surface and what it does is it severs the roots of the weeds like that without damaging the garlic this is another good tool this is like a hand hoe so this is really easy just to get in close with weeds especially as they're a bit closer to your garlic plants just pulls out the roots like that so just get the rest of this lot out now okay so weeds are gone and we've broken up the hard pan compaction on the surface so now before we mulch this bed we're going to give it a quick feed now first of all what I've got here this is blood and bone meal and this stuff it's really high in nutrients it's good for addressing around late spring early summer and you really just scatter it around as if you were sticking icing sugar on a sponge cake there we go now if you're a vegetarian and you don't want to be using animal products on your garden as in blood and bone meal then another good option is sheep pellets sheep pellets a great again full of nutrients they're also really good mulching layer I'm going to bang these on top as well because garlic is a really heavy feeder at this time of year so if you weren't using blood and bone meal there you'd use a bit more of the Sheep pellets that I'm using now you don't even have to really dig these in because we're going to put the mulch on top so we've now got some nutrients on this bed that are going to nourish the plants we want to give them a quick water out before the mulch so what I've got here this is some worm deuce I've diluted about one to ten again if you weren't going to use bone meal this would be a really good thing to give your plants a direct hit with so I'm just going to go along the rows and hope my watering can doesn't run out so we did fed and watered all you got to do now is to mulch okay so this is the mulch that I'm going to use this is pea straw you could use compost you could use straw as well or even leaf mold now if you mulched your plants when you sowed your garlic in the middle of winter you still might want to be applying more now because you want that mulching layer to be about your thumbs length thick something like that okay so I'm going to put this on around the garlic so great thing about mulch is that it suppresses the weeds it holds in the moisture and and also it feeds microbiology of the soil that breaks down the nutrients in the soil to feed your garlic so it's a win-win-win event right now and this garlic is going to be really good to grow through the summer until it's time for harvest okay seeing as this piece draw is pretty dry I'm just going to wet it stop it all blowing away and this bed's now ready to go right through into summer all you need to do with your garlic between spring and late summer when it starts to go yellow keep the soil moist and you can feed it every three or four weeks with whatever compost or nutrient liquid or otherwise that you prefer