Garlic growing is easy in the home garden.
Maintaining top quality requires care and attention. Weeding is important as
garlic does not like competition. Watering and not watering,
harvesting on time and curing properly are all important for
producing bulbs with good keeping qualities.
Soil Preparation
Garlic will grow under a wide variety of soil conditions. It
is said to prefer free draining loam with lots of organic matter.
Building up your soil with green manures as part of your normal
crop rotation is good practice.
Tip - Green Manure
An excellent and inexpensive way of putting organic matter, nitrogen and other nutrients into the soil is to grow a nitrogen-fixing cover crop such as clover, alfalfa or field peas. When the crop is anything from a few inches to a few feet high it is tilled into the ground.
Note: if you are using a garden rototiller you need to till the crop under before the stems are too tough for your tiller to deal with. If you are using farm equipment you can let the crop get more mature. |
When to Plant Garlic
In Canada most varieties of garlic, under most conditions, do best when planted in the fall. The timing of fall planting should be such that the roots have a chance to develop and the tops do not break the surface before winter. We have planted in the spring with mixed results.
Tip – In Warmer Climates Store Your Hardneck Garlic in a Cool Spot Before Planting
Hardneck garlics need to go through a cold period to trigger sprouting. If your soil temperatures stay warm, store the garlic in a cool, dry place, 7 - 10°C (45 - 50°F), for about three weeks before planting. |
Preparing Cloves for Planting
Shortly before planting break the bulbs apart into cloves. This is called ‘cracking’.
The cloves are attached to the basal plate, the plate that the
roots grow from. When you crack the bulb each clove should break
away cleanly, leaving an intact ‘footprint’ on the basal plate.
Set aside the very small cloves to eat soon, to make into pickles, to dry, or to plant tightly together for eating in the spring, like green onions. Each larger clove will produce a good sized bulb by the end of the growing season. The smallest cloves require just as much space, care and attention in the garden and produce significantly smaller bulbs.
Tip - Separate the Cloves just before Planting
If you separate the garlic cloves as close to planting time as possible, preferably within 24 hours, the root nodules won’t dry out and the garlic will be able to set roots quickly. |
Planting Garlic
You can plant garlic in single or double rows or in intensive
beds with four to six plants across. We have lots of land and
plant garlic in well-tilled beds of six rows, with about eight
inch spacing between rows and between plants. Tighter spacing
in the beds will produce a greater number of smaller bulbs for
a higher total yield in terms of pounds of garlic per square
foot of garden.
It is important to plant hard neck garlic with the top (pointed end) of the clove up, at least two inches below the surface.
When you have planted the garlic you can cover it with a layer of mulch if you wish.
Mulching
Mulching conserves moisture, moderates soil temperatures and inhibits weeds. It also shelters rodents and attracts deer and elk. All these factors need to be considered in deciding whether or not to mulch.
Mulching can even out the soil moisture between rains and irrigation cycles.
It is not recommended in wetter climates where excess water
can be a problem for garlic.
Moderating soil temperature is helpful where there are extremes
of heat and cold. Garlic does not like repeated freezing and
thawing. Frost heaves can tear the young roots from the cloves.
A thick layer of winter mulch is a good insurance against winter
kill. Garlic does not like extreme heat either and mulch will
moderate the daily fluctuations in summer soil temperatures.
Chopped leaves, swamp grass, reeds and alfalfa hay are among
the preferred mulch materials. Grain straw is not recommended
because it can host wheat curl mite which will attack garlic.
Grass hay is fine if you don’t mind lots of grass seed in your
soil.
In our area,around zone 4, growers put on about 10 cm (4”)
of chopped mulch in the fall for winter protection. By spring
this has settled to 5 cm (2”) which is enough for weed suppression
and heat and moisture control. Where winters are harsher, thicker
winter mulch is advisable and then some may need to be pulled
back in the spring.
Garlic Flowers
Hard neck varieties produce a central stalk which goes straight up and then usually makes one or two loops. The garlic top is called a scape, garlic flower or top set, and contains a bulge where bulbils will form. If you want all the plant's energy to go into producing a large bulb, snip the scape off after it has made one or two loops. If you want to use the bulbils to propagate more garlic, leave them in place until harvest time and then dry them separately from the bulbs.
Tip - Steam or Stir Fry Garlic Flowers
The garlic tops, called flowers or garlic scapes, are a gourmet delight! Steam them whole and serve with melted butter like asparagus. Cut them into short lengths to add to a stir fry. They have a delicate garlic flavour which gives a subtly different and delicious flavour to the sauce. |
Bulbils
Rocamboles garlics make a few tens of bulbils the size of the tip of a small finger from each garlic ‘flower’. These bulbils will form small bulbs in one season.
Leningrad and other porcelain garlic varieties make hundreds of bulbils the size of grains of rice. Leningrad bulbils take at least three years to reach mature bulb size.
Visit our new page on Growing Garlic from Bulbils for further information.
Watering Garlic
Garlic requires fairly even soil moisture during its early growth and then no additional moisture during the last few weeks. Mulch is one way of maintaining an even moisture regime. Not enough moisture means that garlic does not develop a full sized bulb. Over watering results in garlic with poor keeping qualities - poor wrappers, burst skins and mould.
Tip - Do Not Over Water
If you want to keep your garlic through the winter, it is safer to stop watering too soon than to try to get the last bit of size to the bulbs since over watering shortens the life of bulbs. |
Harvesting Garlic
A few weeks before harvesting stop watering the garlic. Different growers have different rules of thumb regarding the best time to harvest:
- when the lower leaves are half to three-quarters brown
- when the plants are 40% brown, 60% green.
The dying back of the leaves is only an approximate indicator. Inspect a few bulbs in the ground by carefully scraping away the dirt. Pull the garlic from the ground when the bulb has reached a good size and before the wrappers begin to deteriorate or the bulbs begin to split open. If a bulb is not well-wrapped, and the skins on the cloves are not intact, the garlic will not keep well. Learning exactly when to stop watering and when to harvest is a matter of judgment that comes with experience.
We have a late spring and in our location we begin harvesting
our earliest varieties in mid to late July. The main harvest
continues into August, with the late varieties and spring planted
beds being harvested in late August. We use a flat, narrow-bladed
shovel to loosen the ground beside the garlic - we pierce fewer
bulbs with it than we did with a fork - and pull the plants
by hand. Be careful as garlic bruises easily.
Tip - Avoid Sunburning Your Garlic
Some varieties of garlic change flavour when left in the sun and so we take each batch of garlic into the curing barn as soon as it is harvested and bundled. |
Managing Garlic Beds for Pests and Disease
There are a number of practices that minimize the risk of pests or disease. The ones we consider the most important are:
- Use only clean, sound cloves from disease-free stock.
- Allow two years or more between successive crops in the allium
family (garlic, onions, leeks, chives, elephant garlic).
- During the growing season remove (rogue) plants that are not doing
well and send suspicious plants to the dump.
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