Planting Garlic

One Year Ago: Oinkers

Our Vegetable Garden can be summed up in a word, “Garlic.”

Last fall, even though I knew we would be giving the land a rest this year, I decided to do a little experimenting and I picked up a head of garlic from the grocery store and planted it in a piece of ground that had only been turned under for a year. I had no expectations except that I was under the mistaken impression that garlic was ready to harvest in the spring! (I planned our year of rest to start in May.) Imagine my surprise when it wasn’t ready until July and I was getting worried I’d have to leave it behind when we moved!

That one head yielded a pound of small softneck garlic which I cured in the stock trailer before we left so it wasn’t accidentally left behind and is now braided and hanging in my pantry.

This fall, I find myself going through gardening withdrawal and thanks to the goodness of garlic being a fall-planted crop, I have been able to get a bit of a fix and get my hands dirty in the planting.

I wanted to find a seed source that was local since that should make the seed grow well and be adapted to our climate and, thanks to Local Harvest, found one.

From their selection, I chose Chet’s Italian – a mild artichoke softneck. (Mild being a criteria because we’re still adjusting our tastes to the strength of real garlic and softneck because it stores longer.) The artichoke varieties have well over a dozen cloves per head.

As a child, garlic was something that came in powdered form that was heavily cut with iodized salt. And even then rarely used.

After learning the valuable and medicinal properties of garlic over the years, I have been determined to introduce the flavor to our palates and have slowly been incorporating them into more and more dishes, substituting the real thing for the garlic salt and powder in the recipes in my family cookbook.

We used the instructions that came with the garlic. They said they had the most success growing it in that way (I found them written out here). But then I see it being recommended here to soak the heads in liquid kelp first to give the roots a boost before winter.Interesting.

Note to self: Next year, make an experiment of this.

The instructions give a large window of time to plant with October after the first light frost being ideal. Leaving the seed lying around, just begging to be peeled open is a dangerous thing in our home so we planted just this side of ideal. (We haven’t had our first light frost yet but expect it any day. Maybe even tonight.)

I tried to do some math during planting… The pound of garlic seed I bought came in six heads. So I divided all the cloves into groups of six of which there ended up being 11 full piles. So I’m wondering if an optimistic estimate for the garlic harvest would be about 11 pounds??

Guess we’ll see next year.

And that my friends was our Vegetable Garden this year. Exciting, no?

What variety of garlic do you grow in your garden?