Growing garlic at home is a wonderful experience!
You plant in the fall, which alone is so unusual, the garlic grows a little in the fall and then emerges in the early spring welcoming you to a new season. It’s harvested, cured, and ready to use just when your home garden is producing all kinds of goodies you can use the garlic with. Plus, it’s a reasonably trouble free crop with few disease or insect pests. Garlic should be a regular part of your home garden plan!
You plant in the fall, which alone is so unusual, the garlic grows a little in the fall and then emerges in the early spring welcoming you to a new season. It’s harvested, cured, and ready to use just when your home garden is producing all kinds of goodies you can use the garlic with. Plus, it’s a reasonably trouble free crop with few disease or insect pests. Garlic should be a regular part of your home garden plan!
Garlic Growing Basics:
- Garlic grows best in well-drained, moisture-retentive soil with pH between 6.0 and 7.0.
- Improve your soil’s organic matter content by adding well-rotted manure or compost in spring or fall. Do not use fresh manure as it may contain harmful bacteria and may increase weed problems.
- Prior to planting, till your soils to provide a loose growing bed for bulb growth.
- Garlic has a moderate to high demand for nitrogen, so you can incorporate urea before planting.
- Top dress as soon as shoots emerge, then again two to three weeks afterward.
- Avoid applying nitrogen after the first week in May, or you may delay bulbing.
- You may not need additional nitrogen in the spring if you incorporated enough compost in the fall.
Types of Garlic:
Hardneck types
Hardneck types
- Hardneck varieties produce a flowering stalk, called a scape.
- Flowers on scapes usually abort and form "bulbils," or small, aerial cloves.
- You can remove scapes just after they start curling and eat them.
- These varieties typically produce more cloves and are easy to braid.
- Softneck varieties typically do not grow a flowering stalk like the hardneck types.
Growing Garlic:
Watering your garlic:
- To grow garlic, you must plant cloves. Purchase cloves from national or local garlic seed producers.
- Avoid planting cloves from garlic purchased at the grocery store intended for culinary use. This garlic, primarily the soft neck variety, may have been treated with sprout inhibitors which will result in poor performance in your garden.
- Plant cloves in the fall, usually one or two weeks after the first killing frost.
- Roots and shoots will emerge from the cloves by the first hard freeze, but shoots will usually not emerge from the soil until the following spring.
- Separate individual cloves a day or two before planting.
- Plant cloves six inches apart. Plant cloves pointed side up, with the base of the clove two to three inches from the soil surface.
- At planting add about 1 pound of a 10-10-10 fertilizer per 100 square feet. Adjust accordingly for a different percentage of Nitrogen ( the first number) in your fertilizer. In early spring, around March 15th in the Philadelphia area, for example, add another 1 1/2 pounds of fertilizer per 100 square feet. Then do a final fertilization of 1 more pound around mid-April.
- Cover beds with three inches of leaf or straw mulch to prevent fluctuating temperatures during the winter and early spring, and to help control weeds.
- Remove mulch in the spring after the threat of hard freezes is over to help the soil warm up. You can also leave it in place to help with weed control and preserve soil moisture.
- Remove the 'scape' once it curls, it's the garlic plant's flower stem. Removing it helps your garlic grow bigger. Just follow the scape stem down to the center of the plant and cut it (and only it!) out with scissors. Don't throw the scape away, it's very edible and delicious!
Watering your garlic:
- Proper watering will help the growth of your garlic plants.
- Soak the soil thoroughly when watering, to a depth of at least one inch each week during the growing season.
- Sandy soils require more frequent watering.
- Stop watering two weeks before harvest to avoid staining bulb wrappers and promoting diseases.
This is how your garlic should look when ready to harvest. About half the leaves have dried up.
Harvesting, Curing, and Storing Your Garlic :
- Harvesting too early will result in small bulbs. Harvesting too late will result in cloves popping out of bulbs.
- Depending on variety and climate zone, harvest garlic between late June and late July.
- Begin harvesting when the lower leaves turn brown and when half or slightly more than half of the upper leaves remain green.
- Alternatively, you can pull a few bulbs and cut them in half. If the cloves fill the skins, then the bulbs are ready to harvest.
- Harvest the garlic plants with shoots and bulbs attached. Knock off any large clumps of soil. DO NOT WASH!
- Put the plants in a warm, dry, airy place for three to four weeks to cure. A dry basement or a garage is good. This will dry the sheaths surrounding the bulbs, as well as the shoots and roots.
- After curing, cut the shoots one-half to one inch above the bulbs and the roots trimmed close to the bulb base. Store the bulbs in a cool or room temperature, dry and dark location. They should keep for several months. DO NOT REFRIGERATE, unless you’ve cut into a bulb and you have a skinned clove. Then just put it in a plastic bag in the refrigerator to use soon.
Enjoy the best-tasting garlic that you grew yourself!
Gorgeous red cloves of Chesnock Red Garlic. They taste as good as they look!
Summer Wind Farms crew laying out freshly harvested organic garlic for curing on wire benches in our shade covered. greenhouses. Fans run 24/7 to help with the curing. In about two weeks they are ready to store and eat!