Notes From the Garden: Now Is the Time to Plant Garlic

Garlic is one of those magical ingredients that give foods depth of flavor and the richness of another world. Italian food, French food, Indian food, these all include liberal use of garlic. Why the English decided on fish and chips and boiled dinners as their staples is a mystery to me. Maybe they cant grow garlic. But Ive been growing garlic for my kitchen for decades. Its easy to grow and now is the time to plant it for next year.

Your first task is to find some garlic suitable for planting. You cant just go the grocery store and buy some. Most commercial (non-organic) garlic has been treated with chemicals to keep it from sprouting. Instead, go to your garden center to buy some, or get a few heads of garlic from a farmstand or a friend who grows it.

Here in New England, the recommended type of garlic is called hardneck garlic and it survives our cold weather nicely. Softneck garlic, commonly grown in California, is less cold tolerant. It is the type that can be braided and hung in the kitchen. Hardneck garlic sends up a stiff stalk, called a scape, which grows out of the middle of the bulb a stiff neck, if you will.

Hardneck garlic generally has a stronger, richer flavor with more bite. It also comes in a wide range of flavors, just as different varieties of tomatoes and sweet corn have distinct flavors. Hardneck garlic is often classified as either rocambole, porcelain or purple stripe. Rocambole garlic has a tan outer covering and usually produces up to a dozen cloves per bulb. Porcelain garlic has a satiny white wrapper and tend to produce larger cloves with as few as four per bulb. Purple stripe garlic is one of my favorites: It is productive, tasty and generally a nice, plump size.

I like to say that everyone would be a gardener if growing all vegetables were as easy as growing garlic. There are just three steps to growing garlic: planting it, mulching it, and harvesting it. Thats right, if you mulch well it will grow well and you will never, or seldom, need to weed.

I grow garlic (and all my vegetables) in wide, mounded beds. Each bed is 30 to 36 inches wide, and mounded up 4 to 6 inches above the walkways. A short-tined garden rake or hoe is useful for shaping the beds, and to gather up loose soil from the walkways.

The first step when planting garlic is to remove any weeds from the soil. Then I enrich the soil by adding 3 or 4 inches of compost on top of the bed I am planting it in. I use a garden fork or my CobraHead hand weeder to stir the compost into the top few inches of soil. Rototilling would mix the compost in deeper good for drainage in a clay soil if you have it, but away from the roots of my garlic.

Rows of garlic need to be spaced about 6 inches apart. Most years I plant short rows across my wide beds, but sometimes I will plant rows down the length of the beds. It really doesnt matter which way you do it. I create furrows with a hand tool in the fluffy soil of my bed and sprinkle on some bagged organic fertilizer, then mix that in.

It is important to plant your garlic right side up. If you look at a bulb of garlic, you should be able to see roots, or where the roots have been cut off. The top of a clove has a slightly pointy tip, and the bottom has a small, flat scar. And of course, when looking at a bulb of hardneck garlic you can see where the scape grew. If you plant the cloves upside down, they use up a lot of energy trying to get started and grow toward the sun.

To plant, just push each clove into the prepared soil about 4 inches away from its nearest neighbor. The top of the clove should be 2 to 3 inches beneath the soil after you cover it up. Pat the soil with your hands to firm it up.

Originally posted here:
Notes From the Garden: Now Is the Time to Plant Garlic