Garlic Galore!

October is the perfect time to plant garlic. The soil is still workable but the weather has turned cool and brisk. Garlic requires several months of cool temperatures in order to achieve dormancy, which helps the garlic develop a strong root system before producing new shoots in the spring.

This past weekend, we planted our first crop of garlic. We ordered a sample kit from Mountain Valley Garlic, an organic seed company from Washington State. In our sample kit we received three varieties of hardneck garlic and one variety of shallot. Hardneck garlic is more suited for our cold climate gardening zone (Zone 4).

All three of the garlic varieties we received were medium to large heads and required spacing of 6in x 6in.

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The first and most important aspect of planting garlic is preparing the soil. We use raised gardening beds due to our heavy clay soil. We have spent years composting and preparing our beds but we still made sure to add an extra layer of nitrogen rich compost in the form of composted duck manure and straw. We used a pitchfork and bow rake to mix in the compost and break up the soil.

Our garden beds are 4 by 8 so we then ran six rows of of burlap twine spaced 8 inches apart to provide maximum growing space for all varieties. We measured and drilled wood screws every 8 inches at either end of the garden bed in order to ensure our rows were straight and evenly spaced.

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Once the lines were strung, we measured our first row and used the handle end of a rake to make 1.5 inch deep holes. We followed our first row pattern to complete each subsequent row exactly the same distance.

Each bunch of garlic must be separated into individual cloves. Different varieties of garlic have different amount of cloves in each bunch. The varieties we purchased were:

Purple Glazer

Large, Hardneck variety. Approx. 9 cloves per bunch.

Chenok Red

Large, hardneck variety. Approx. 12 cloves per bunch.

Romanian Red Porcelain

Large, hardback variety. Approx. 3-4 cloves per bunch.

Dutch Red Shallots

One shallot bulb

Each individual clove is placed in the hole pointed side up. We continued this way until we ran out of cloves and had filled all six rows! We gently covered the holes with a layer of soil, smoothing out the entire surface.

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The final step was to cover the entire bed with leaf mulch and soak. That's it! A few hours of work and warm sunshine should yield us 76 bunches of garlic. Half of those will be used for seed garlic and the other half will be used to feed our family.

How many of you plant garlic? Any tips or tricks? Or are you new and have some questions? Let me know!