How To Grow Your Own Garlic (and How To Not Get Any Planted): Garden Journal 1/1/13

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Save your biggest cloves for planting next year's garlic crop.

Realization of the Day:

December is a bad time for me to plan on planting my garlic.

Of course I knew this already. The best time to plant garlic is a month or two before the ground freezes. Here in Missouri that means October. In warmer regions, you can plant after the first frost date through early winter. Ideally you want to get good root growth but no top growth before winter, although I've had sprouts shoot up before it got really cold, and they survived just fine.

If you're gardening by the moon, you want to put your garlic in the ground on a fertile day during the third or fourth quarter. (If you're interested in learning more about minding the moonsigns, Astrological Gardening: The Ancient Wisdom of Successful Planting & Harvesting by the Stars by Louise Riotte is a great book.)

The kitchen garden on Saturday, December 29th.

Miraculously, I did actually manage to get my garlic in the ground in October in both 2011 and 2010, but this year my planting plans were waylaid. Then I missed November. And on Saturday, which was my scheduled December planting day, the ground was frozen and there were three inches of snow on it. Yesterday and today are good planting days as well, except for the old snow and the new sleet. But that's okay.

Lots more below. . .

The kitchen garden (and part of The Shack) today, taken from the upstairs of the new house.

I'll just wait. I've planted garlic as late as March, and while the bulbs didn't end up as big—because they didn't get their pre-winter rooting—any homegrown garlic is better than none. The other problem with waiting so long is that some of my heads of garlic earmarked for planting (you want to save and plant the biggest cloves from your previous harvest) are already starting to rot. It's okay if the cloves have sprouted (for planting or eating).

Mr. Midnight supervises preparation of a 4' x 8' raised garden bed on October 21, 2011.

Depending on how cold it gets (and stays) over the next few months, I may be able to dig into the raised bed I've designated for my 2013 garlic crop in February. Or maybe even during a January heat wave, which we often have.

Garlic likes very fertile soil and full sun. If your plants are well fertilized, you probably won't have any problems with pests, which makes it a great crop for organic gardeners. You can actually grow garlic in various spots around your garden to help deter pests.

According to my favorite gardening book, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, garlic should not be planted where you've just grown any onion family crop. Good companions for garlic are beets and lettuce. Bad companions are beans and peas.

I use my trusty Korean hand plow (also called an EZ-Digger, and my favorite garden tool for the past 17 years) to plant my garlic cloves about one inch deep, pointed end up, every six inches, in rows that are six inches apart.

If you double plant the cloves (like I did in the two left rows), you can—without taking up any extra garden space—grow a crop of green garlic, which is wonderful stuff. You'll find my green garlic fettuccine recipe and more about growing green garlic here.

I cover the entire bed with a layer of sheep manure (an excellent organic fertilizer) and inch or two thick and then several inches of hay (I try to use mostly stems the sheep leave in their hay feeders). You can also mulch your garlic bed with straw, grass clippings, leaves, etc. If the mulch is really thick I pull it off around late February, but if it's broken down enough so that the garlic plants are all poking up through it, I leave the mulch there as a weed suppressant. Garlic does not do well with weeds.

The garlic bed on March 1, 2012.

The garlic bed on March 16, 2012.

The garlic bed on April 29, 2012.

On October 22, 2011, I planted 160 nice big cloves (which weighed 3 pounds, 4 ounces) of my spring 2011 hardneck garlic crop in one 4' x 8' raised bed. Once the plants start growing in late winter, they take off quickly.

If this is your first time growing your own garlic, you can simply buy some cloves to plant from the farmers' market, which is nice because you can taste them first, or you can order mail order garlic from a seed supplier. There are all kinds of varieties of garlic available, some a lot spicier than others. You can also search for locally grown garlic on LocalHarvest.org.

There is no difference between eating garlic and planting garlic—it's all the same stuff—although the instruction sheet that came with some garlic I ordered years ago from Johnny's Selected Seeds says, "The garlic you have received has been grown especially for 'seed,' and has been allowed to remain in the ground for an average of 7 to 10 days longer than garlic grown for consumption."

Garlic at the supermarket has sometimes been treated with chemicals to keep it from sprouting. It's also usually the softneck variety (which doesn't send up a scape), and most gardeners I know prefer to grow hardneck (sometimes called stiffneck) garlic, which has a single ring of cloves enclosing a stiff, central stem. The cloves are bigger and it generally stores better than softneck.

Once you have your fist homegrown garlic crop, you'll never have to buy any for planting again, as long as you remember to set some of your harvest aside. Store it in a cool, dry, dark place, and don't separate the cloves until you're ready to plant them.

The best thing about growing garlic is that it will actually adapt to its location, so as the years go by your strain will keep improving.

When the plants send up hard round stems (called scapes) with "topsets" on top in late spring, I snip them off to encourage bulb growth using my beloved take-apart shears (I use these so much in the kitchen and garden I bought a second pair).

I dug my garlic plants up up (again using my trusty Korean hand plow) on June 6th, which was a few weeks earlier than most years. The bulbs would probably have been bigger if I'd thought to water the garlic bed during the spring drought.

The best time to harvest garlic depends on where you live and the weather each year. In some places you let the plants turn completely brown, but here in Missouri mine is ready when only about a third of the leaves have started turning yellow. If you leave your bulbs in the ground too long, they'll separate and rot.

The best way to check if your garlic is ready is to simply dig up one of the plants and see if the cloves are fully formed.

Garlic curing in the greenhouse.

I let the freshly dug garlic cure on a screen in my homemade greenhouse (you want it out of direct hot sun) until the skins are dry and the necks are tight, about two weeks. You can eat your garlic right away, but if you want to store it for a while, you need to cure it. I know I weighed the final harvest, but I have no idea where I wrote the total down.

Warm up with this hearty Roasted Garlic Lover's White Bean Soup (recipe here)

Garlic is one of the healthiest things you can grow. As for what to do with your beautiful homegrown bounty, I say pretty much anything that doesn't have chocolate in it probably needs some garlic.

Is your garlic in the ground yet? Any garlic planting tips, growing stories, or favorite recipes to share? Two of my favorite recipes that call for lots of garlic are this Roasted Garlic Lover's White Bean Soup (it's cheap, easy, healthy, vegetarian, vegan, and fat free!) and this simple Pasta with Olive Oil, Garlic, Pecorino, and Parsley.

More garlic growing posts:

4/19/06: Spring Green Garlic: Growing It, Cooking with It, Loving It

9/6/06: Growing Hardneck Garlic

8/10/10: Harvesting Really Late Planted Garlic

10/22/10: It's Time to Plant Garlic!

6/23/11: Growing Garlic, Harvesting Garlic, and Green Garlic

© FarmgirlFare.com, where Farmgirl Susan shares recipes, stories, and photos from her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres—and there can never be too much fresh garlic.