Tis the season to plant garlic

Autumn is bulb-planting time, not just for freesias and ixias and jonquils, but for that much tastier spring bulb, garlic. Mickey Robertson, who gardens at Glenmore House in Camden, says she aims to get the garlic in before Anzac Day, and drops everything if the day passes with the garlic still waiting for a home.

She plants around 200 of the fattest cloves from last harvest's best-looking heads. This strategy served her well until last year when a lack of rain in the spring produced puny heads, which, though tasty, were disappointing stock material. So this year, she's going back to her original source of fat cloves, Patrice Newell, who grows garlic at Elmswood Farm in the Upper Hunter.

Garlic needs full sun and well-drained soil. A cold winter is preferred to encourage the development of a multi-cloved head. It's the difference between day and night temperatures that triggers this so in warmer areas of Sydney or in particularly warm winters, the head may not split into cloves, but it's worth giving it a try. Plant as many cloves as you want heads of garlic, spaced about a handspan apart, planted pointy end up and covered with about 7cm of soil. Source garlic from Diggers, growers, such as Patrice Newell, or from the greengrocer (choose Australian-grown garlic, recognisable by the attached roots).

Robertson gives her garlic a side dressing of blood and bone when the shoots are a few centimetres tall, but otherwise ignores them until spring, when they need watering if the rains fail. "From about the end of September, I feel the urge to see what they're doing," she says. "They look a bit like a spring onion at that stage, with a small bulb on the end, and we eat maybe a dozen of them like that. I call it wet garlic – it's juicy, sticky, pungent and aromatic.'

Garlic is gardening by public holidays – in before Anzac Day, out around Melbourne Cup Day. Once the leaves start to die off and the plant looks in danger of keeling over, they all need to be pulled out. Traditionally the pulled garlic was left to dry and cure in the fields, but that's a bit risky as a drenching rain could ruin the lot.

Robertson cures her garlic on sturdy wire sheets suspended over wheelbarrows to allow plenty of airflow. Once the skins are papery, she bunches about a dozen bulbs together – who's got time to plait garlic! – ties them with string and hangs them on cup hooks in the cool, dry cellar. "The sight of all that fresh garlic hanging on its hooks on the wall is divine," she says. Big rewards for small effort.

Mickey Robertson hosts Patrice Newell's Adventures with Garlic at Glenmore House on Thursday, March 8. Visit glenmorehouse.com.au for more information.