Hi, I’m Dave Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom. Fall is a great time to plant bulbs, garlic is a bulb we’re going to plant some garlic today. We’re going to tell you exactly how to do it to get great garlic next spring and summer.
Fall is the preferred time to plant garlic, you can’t plant it in the spring, and some folks do especially in very cold climates, but we tend to find that if you plant it in the fall you get a better crop. When do you want to plant it? Generally, anywhere from September through November, September would be in the coldest spots November zone 6 or 7.
So how do you plant garlic? You’ve got to get a garlic bulb that’s plantable. Order from a catalogue, go to your favorite nursery or you can use organic garlic. You don’t want to use conventional garlic. Some of that has been treated with a chemical, so that it will not sprout. And then if you plant it it’s not going to grow.
After you get the garlic you take the bulb and you break it into individual cloves. Each of these cloves will sprout next spring and give you a new bulb. So if you have 20 cloves, 20 bulbs. Since garlic is a bulb, it tends to like more phosphorus and phosphate rather than nitrogen. It tends to grow better with that. You might want to amend the soil with the phosphate or the phosphorus if you need it. When planting the clove be sure that the pointee end is up the flat end down, that’s where the roots are going to come out.
Now I planted this one about 6 days ago, look at the roots already beginning to show. I’ve got to get this back in the ground of course. What you don’t want is a lot of green growth early in the fall. If you plant it too early, the growth will start too much and then you’ll have problems next spring. Garlic is planted flat end down pointee end up, about 4 inches below the surface of the ground, in nice loose soil, 4 to 8 inches apart.
The last thing I like to do is cover the area with hay. This helps to keep the moisture in and keeps temperatures a little more uniformed during the course of the winter. So by planting garlic in the fall, you’ll be sure to have some great product just like this next summer.
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