Basics Of Planting Garlic

 

The Basics Of Planting And Growing Garlic - If you are planning on growing garlic, look for a sunny spot to place them. In most locations you can plant garlic early in the spring. In areas having severe winters and very cold springs you may do better purchasing greenhouse grown plants and transplanting those rather than growing from cloves. For most gardens though, growing from cloves should work just fine. If you can get cloves into the ground in February or March, or transplants into the ground in April or even May, you should have mature plants in July or August, although you might have to wait until September if you experience a cool and wet summer. While garlic is traditionally planted in the vegetable garden, or the herb garden, you can plant it in the flower garden if you wish. A garlic plant doesn't particularly care who its neighbors are, as long as it has room to grow and the soil is right. If you have only a small garden area for flowers and a few vegetables, a few garlic plants should fit right in.

Garlic likes a fertile, well worked soil, especially a soil that has good drainage. While uniformly constant moisture is needed to ensure a good crop, garlic doesn't like wet feet any more than many other plants do, so make certain that where you set out your plants is going to drain well and not be a place where standing water is apt to occur. The soil also needs to have a pH of 6.0 or higher. 6.5 or higher is even better. Mixing a little lime into the soil a few weeks before planting is a good idea, and mixing in compost and an all purpose fertilizer will get your plants off to a good start as well.

It's best if the cloves you are planting are still on the bulb, and broken off just prior to planting. This will keep the clove's root system from drying out. Plant only the largest cloves. You can plant all of the cloves of course, but the smaller cloves might not give you satisfactory results. Place the cloves in the soil with the pointed ends up and cover with 2 inches of soil above the pointed end. Some will tell you that planting the cloves 5 inches apart will be fine, others say to distance them 8 inches apart and plant rows 8 inches apart as well. Placing rows 8 inches apart makes sense from the standpoint of making cultivation easier. Plants and rows 6 inches apart might be a good compromise, especially if you have limited space.

Once your garlic has been planted, planted you should keep the soil moist, though not soggy. In this respect, mulch is a very good idea as it helps in several ways. Mulch helps to keep the soil moisture relatively uniform, which is what the plant likes. A layer of mulch also helps keep the soil temperature more uniform, especially if the outside temperatures are swinging from one extreme to the other. Finally, mulch helps keep weeds down. Garlic does not care much for competition from weeds, and if not kept relatively weed free, will not perform well.

Keep the plants moist until mid-summer or about a month before you plan on harvesting them. In late July or August, the leaves should begin to turn brown. This is a sign to stop watering altogether. At the same time, the garlic flower, or scape, may be forming. If it is the cloves that are of primary interest for harvesting purposes, cut the scape off. When it's time to harvest the bulbs, do so careful so as not to bruise the bulbs. If bruised, they will not keep well. Once dug up, they should hung up to dry (you can braid the soft-neck varieties), out of the sun.

In summary, if you are growing garlic for the very first time, have properly prepared soil, choose a type that is grown in your area, and keep the plants moist until nearing time for harvest, and you should do quite well. And do plant a few extras for a garlic flower stir fry.