Garlic Planting 101

So you're ready to plant some garlic? Garlic is planted in the fall and harvested the following year. It may seem like a terribly long time to have to wait. But, when it pops up first thing in the spring it just might feel like that is the best part!

Garlic isn't hard to grow. Here is a basic rundown of what you need to do:

• Plant a few weeks before your location gets its first frost. (Basically about the time the rest of the garden is finishing and you are doing fall cleanup.) 
• Prepare a bed, nice and deep, work in some good compost if you have it.
• If it isn't done already, separate your bulbs into cloves, keeping the paper skins in tact.
• Plant cloves 6-8 inches apart.
• Cloves are planted with the root end down, pointy end up.
• Push cloves into the soil to  a depth about 3 times the clove's length.
• Give your garlic plot a good watering. 
• Cover planted garlic with 3-6 inches of organic mulch. (Straw, alfalfa, grass clippings or old hay all work great.)
• You are all finished until next year, now just wait for your garlic to grow!

Simple, isn't it? Your garlic will likely be the first green thing up in the garden the next year. Ours starts emerging just days after the snow recedes.

One thing to keep in mind when planting is that you will need to be able to weed the bed in the spring. We plant our garlic four abreast in beds two feet wide, this way we can weed from either side of the bed without straining our backs.