Plant garlic bulbs now for harvest next summer

Unlike most food crops that are planted in the spring, garlic is planted in the fall, sometime around Columbus Day.

Fresh garlic can be found in the kitchens of those who enjoy cooking, but it’s not found very often in vegetable gardens even though it’s a relatively straightforward crop to grow. Maybe that’s because it is planted in the fall after the main gardening season has finished.

It was not always the case that home cooks used very much garlic in their recipes. If you look at old cookbooks, you’ll sometimes see that the recipe calls for a single garlic clove stuck on a toothpick. That’s so it could be easily found and removed before too much of the garlic flavor was released into whatever the cook was preparing. That was back in the days before the general population was exposed to international cuisine. That generation just simply did not eat much garlic unless their family was from a part of the world where it was part of their diet.

Garlic is planted from bulbs, the same parts that we call cloves in the kitchen. There are two basic types of garlic, soft-neck and hard-neck. Soft-neck is the kind most often found in grocery store produce departments. In addition to a row of regular-sized cloves growing around the outside of the bulb, it also has a row of small cloves that grow into and fill the center of the bulbs. These are often small and hard to peel. Soft neck varieties store longer than hard-neck garlic, which may account for its popularity in retail markets.

Hard-neck garlic gets its name from the hard stalk at the center of each bulb. This is what is left from the garlic scape or flower stalk that grows up from the bulb. Scapes are cut off in the summer and used in cooking and are a gourmet ingredient in their own right.

Hard-neck garlic is generally better tasting than soft neck and has none of those pesky small cloves since the stalk is in the center.

The main disadvantage to hard neck is that it is more likely to sprout during storage. We have always planted hard-neck garlic.

Like virtually all vegetable crops, garlic needs good growing conditions in order to produce the best crop. They require a well-drained spot with fertile soil and full sun, otherwise they end up growing small, poor-quality bulbs that are hardly worth the effort to grow and harvest.

The spot where you plan to grow your garlic crop must be free of all weeds and kept that way during the growing season because garlic does not compete well against weeds. If you need to amend your soil with compost, manure or other organic material to bring it up to optimum condition, now's the time to apply it.

To plant, break apart the garlic bulbs into individual cloves just as you do in the kitchen, only this time keep the paper-like skins on.

Place the cloves into the soil about 2 inches deep and about 6 inches apart. Make sure the root end is pointed down. If your soil is soft and fluffy, you can just push the cloves down into the soil one at a time with your finger. Otherwise dig a furrow to place them in.

Cover them up with soil and let them go until the soil freezes. During this period, the cloves will begin to grow roots and a small amount of green growth will peek up through the soil.

Once the ground freezes, cover the bed with straw, compost or other type of mulch. It's much better for the garlic if the soil is kept at a consistently cold temperature, which the mulch will provide, rather than to be freezing and thawing over and over through the winter.

In the spring, we will remove our mulch and add fertilizer. Garlic is a crop that needs a lot of plant food. We'll revisit this project again in the spring when we remove the mulch and fertilize our crop.

Garlic is one of those crops where it is best to save your own bulbs to plant from one year to the next. If you select the most prolific and largest bulbs to plant year after year, you will eventually end up with a strain that is adapted to your garden’s micro-climate.

Check full-service garden centers for garlic cloves. If they are sold out, a farmers market stand may have some that you can use for planting. If that fails, you may try growing from supermarket bulbs. Keep in mind that sometimes they are treated with an anti-sprouting chemical and may never sprout even if soil conditions are ideal. An organic food store or coop would be your best bet to find untreated bulbs.

Garlic is an easy crop in that it is planted once, and then harvested all at once.

There is nothing better than using your own fresh, juicy garlic for your cooking.