I love garlic. I always have. Back when I was a kid, I always went into the kitchen asking my mom “What are you cooking? It smells so good.” Her answer was almost always “…..garlic….” When I learned how easy garlic was to grow, I knew I had to try. I assumed it would mostly flop, but we went for it. We planted three pounds of garlic seeds, and harvested well over 10 and a half pounds of garlic.
Last year, in late October/Early November we started planting our garlic. Now is the time to order, and farms will send your seeds in the fall! We got our garlic from Filaree Garlic Farm and obviously had great success, so I ordered through them again. All of our garlic was planted in raised beds, which allowed for larger bulbs since we didn’t have clay compacting the soil. Your planting time may differ based upon what zone you are in and your first freeze dates, so double check all of that.
Your garlic seeds will come as a whole clove of garlic. Break these apart into individual cloves. You want to space your plants 6 inches apart. The clove gets planted with the root side down. The pointy side should be facing up toward the sky. Plant them an inch deep and cover them gently with soil. Cover all of this with mulch. We used wood chips from our chip drop, but you can use straw, leaves, etc.
That’s it. Seriously. All you do is plant it, and leave it. Forget about it all winter. You will see it start to sprout when the weather begins to warm in the spring.
Somewhere around June, our plants all developed scapes. It is this curly looking thing that grows out of the top of your garlic plant. I forgot to get a picture of these, but you can do a quick online search. Cut these as close to the leaves of your garlic plant as possible. You can make pesto out of the scapes or use them in your cooking. Cutting them off allows for the plant to put more energy into producing bigger bulbs. Stiff-necked varieties produce scapes. Soft neck typically do not.
Around July, the leaves of your plants will start to die. This is completely normal no matter how much you water the plants. When around half of the leaves have died off, that is when you will want to harvest your garlic. We harvested some of ours with only one dead leaf. The rest we harvested after more had died off. We didn’t notice any difference in the size of our cloves.
Lay all of your garlic on a table in the shade of your yard to help the skins toughen up– anywhere out of direct sunlight and off of the ground. After a couple of days of this, you will want to hang them up for three or more weeks until they completely dry. Leave the leaves on your plant so that the bulbs can continue absorbing from them. Scott grouped ours in groups of five to six hanging from the garage rafters. You want them to hang in a dry place out of direct sunlight.
We had an abnormally wet July, and let our plants hang for closer to 4 weeks to get them completely dry. Once the bulb and necks are hard and dry, your garlic is ready to be stored. I wish I had faux-braided mine this year, but I didn’t think of it until it was too late. When you are ready to store your garlic, you want to trim the neck down. We left a little over one inch on the neck of our bulbs. Then, you want to trim all of the roots off. Using a dry cloth or soft brush, clean any remaining dirt off of the bulbs. If you have any that have been damaged, you do not want to store those. We broke off the good cloves from our damaged bulbs and have been using them first.
Believe it or not, there are close to 90 heads of garlic in that basket!
