Planting Garlic
You Can Grow It at Home!
When planting garlic, know your climate unless you are willing to wait a few years until your chosen variety adapts to your location. Each clove you plant functions as a seed, and will produce one plant with one bulb. This bulb may produce up to twenty cloves. Garlic is of the allium family. From this family also come your leeks, onions, and shallots.
Cultivation
- Do not use grocery store garlics, as they are often pre-treated to prevent sprouting. Buy them from farmers’ markets.
- Your bulbs should be large, fresh, smooth, and disease-free. Select the best of the outer cloves and plant each separately. You can use the leftover cloves for table food.
- Wait until you are ready to plant before dividing the bulbs, as premature separation will decrease your yield.
- Ideal planting time is in the fall, about mid-October or about two weeks after the first killer frost. This will help the plant roots develop before winter. It will also keep the soil sufficiently cool to prevent the sprouts from going above ground until spring.
- Select a garden ground where there is full sun and loose, rich, well-drained soil. If you soil is nutrient-deficient, supply the needed organic matter such as rotted compost or rotted manure. Your soil should have between 6.0 – 7.0 pH.
- Garlic blends nicely with an herb garden, but keep the area weeded.
- With the pointed end facing up, plant each clove approximately two inches deep and about eight inches apart.
- Spread soil to cover the cloves and follow with about four inches of mulch. The mulch will help the soil with rapid temperature changes and also keep the soil moist.
- Above ground sprouts should be visible by March or April. Keep irrigating regularly, making sure that the soil drains well. This is very important especially between May and July, when the bulbs grow more rapidly. Keep the soil moist, not wet. Fertilize occasionally.
- If you prefer larger bulbs, remove the flowers on top of the scapes when they start to curl. Many gardeners believe that the bulbs have better storage capacity when the texture of the flower scapes have become woody. This will be sometime around the end of May.
- If you plan on propagating the garlic, leave the flower scapes. This will encourage the garlic plant to produce many small bulbils for planting next fall.
- Harvest is usually in the late summer. Dig up the plants and hang a bundle of about eight plants for drying in a well-ventilated area for about a month. When harvesting the bulbs, gently loosen with a trowel the soil around the bulb. Do not bruise the bulbs or they will not store well. Under proper conditions, your garlic can keep between three to four months.
Companion Planting
Some of the plants friendly companions to garlic are beets, broccoli, cabbage, collard greens, lettuce, parsnips, peach trees, rhubarb, roses, tomatoes, etc. Garlic also may help with peach borers. Some plants unfavorable to garlic are asparagus, legumes as in beans, peas, potatoes, etc. Note also that garlic repels aphids.
Pests and Diseases
Garlic is prone to several diseases, most of the main ones are soilborne. To name a few, there are the Basal, Bortrytis, and White rots, the Downey Mildew, the Penicillium Decay, and the Nematode invasion. To help prevent problems, observe the following precautions:
- Do not use infected garden soil. If ground gardening, use rotation methods, and clean equipment prior to working the ground.
- Plant healthy, clean seeds only.
There is no standard way to cultivate garlic. It depends on the variety you choose and your climate. If you are unsure about what varieties to choose when planting garlic, do not hesitate to ask your local garden center.
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