Growing garlic

Story and photos by Greg Auton.

Human beings have been eating garlic for thousands of years, and while many claim that this ancient allium is good for your health, I sincerely doubt that any of us would know a thing about it, were it not for the fact that it enhances the flavour of so many of our favourite foods. Imagine if there were no garlic in your spaghetti, pizza sauce, curry, chili, stir-fry, hummus, guacamole, coq au vin, plov, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.

Suffice it to say, garlic is an essential ingredient in the culinary world, and for us gardeners, this is great news, because nothing could be more easy to plant, grow, harvest and preserve than garlic.

Variety

There are two main types of garlic: hardneck and softneck. The key difference between the two is that hardneck produce a garlic scape (which we will discuss later) and the soft neck do not. I have never grown softneck garlic—and there seems to be fewer cold-hardy varieties of softneck garlic available—so for the purposes of this article I’m limiting the conversation to hardneck garlic.

Within the hardneck category there is a wide range of options, from mild to spicy. In my experience, there is more choice to be found by buying them online. Also, it bears mentioning that while many people choose to use grocery store garlic as seed stock because it tends to be inexpensive and readily available, certified seed garlic should be used. This is because certified seed garlic have been harvested and stored with that use in mind so the harvest and yield will be more reliable. There will also be less risk of bringing soil-borne pathogens into your garden, such as white rot, which can persist in your soil for years and make it impossible to successfully grow garlic.

When

Plant garlic in the fall, sometime after the first frost. Where I live (Nova Scotia) that usually means late September or early October. The trick to optimal timing with garlic is planting them early enough for them to establish roots before the soil freezes, but not so early that they begin to send up shoots and grow. It’s very hard to time this perfectly, but relax, it doesn’t have to be perfect.

In my experience it’s better to plant a little too early than a little too late. The fall root development has a meaningful impact on the yield the following spring, whereas there does not seem to be as much of a cost for the clove sending up a shoot in the fall. The shoot will die back over winter (unless your winter is super-mild) but the plant will be fine and send up more in the spring. Where

Garlic scape.

This garlic is ready to be pulled.

Garlic do best with lots of sun and good soil, so pick a spot that gets lots of sun. If you are not sure about the soil’s fertility, amend it with some compost or well-rotted manure. If you are concerned about committing your best garden realestate to garlic as opposed to other desired crops, remember that they will be harvested in late July or early August, so that space will become available again in late season for moving in other plants as they are thinned from other beds. Fastgrowing fall crops like spinach can also be planted in your finished garlic bed at this time.

How

The technique for planting is simple: put them in the ground about 2 inches deep, about 6 inches apart, and cover the ground with about 2 inches of organic mulch (grass clippings, leaves, straw – anything that will slowly break down and compost). The mulch does many things: • It stabilizes the soil temperature in the fall, so that warm days are less likely to cause the plant to send up shoots. • It stabilizes the soil moisture level so that it’s kept within the range that the garlic needs. • It suppresses weeds the following spring, while the bulbs push shoots up through it • It insulates the soil from the cold winter temperatures. This can buy you an extra month of root development in the fall as the mulch delays the freezing of the soil.

That’s it. Nothing else needs to be done except to harvest them next season. The garlic will take care of themselves thanks to their innate awesomeness and the wondrous benefits of mulching.

Harvesting garlic scapes

Hardneck garlic give you the benefit of two things to harvest. Of course you get garlic bulbs, but in the spring you also get garlic scapes. These are flower-like bulbils that begin to develop in late spring or early summer. They are easy to identify because they only grow straight for a matter of a day or so and then begin to curl and will form multiple curls as they develop.

Removing the scapes increases the size of the garlic bulb substantially (up to 25 percent), but they also are edible with a mild garlic taste which is about half of the intensity of garlic cloves. Generally speaking, it is best to cut the scapes off at their base after they have completed their first full 360-degree curl. When they are harvested at this stage of development, you get the most scape, while still being tender, at the least cost to the plant.

The scapes can be used immediately in your cooking for any dish that requires garlic, and they can also be stored. I have found that the best way to store them is as a paste in small jars in the freezer. The paste is prepared in a food processor, using salt, water, lemon and oil. The scapes can also be made into a pesto and stored in a similar way.

Harvesting garlic

Later into the summer the plant leaves will begin to turn yellow and then brown and look like they are dying. It is around this time that the garlic need to be pulled. If you wait too long to pull them the head of garlic will begin to grow again, and it will not be as good for eating after that stage. A general rule of thumb is to pull the garlic when about half the leaves have died. For me, this usually happens around the 1st week of August, but this varies a week ahead or behind from year to year, and of course will vary according to regional growing conditions.

Garlic in a box for storage.

Storing garlic

Garlic is very easy to store. I grow about 250 heads of it each year and simply store it in cardboard boxes on shelves in my garage, which stays at about 5 to 10 Celsius all winter long. After pulling the garlic, I cut the stems back to about 4 inches long and remove the roots without damaging the bulbs (the roots hold moisture—just cut them off with scissors). I then lay them out somewhere out of the sun with decent airflow. The simplest way to create such a space it to place them on a garage floor on a piece of cardboard, under a small fan.

Leave them like this for about a week, then cut the stems back to about 1 inch and box them up. As long as they stay reasonably cool

(under 10° Celsius but above freezing) they will not sprout all winter long. If you want to put some of these aside for seed garlic, pick your biggest and fattest ones; the bigger the seed garlic, the bigger the garlic! It’s a hard discipline to maintain, but successfully replanting your biggest and best garlic will yield results that will make you the envy of your garlic-loving friends. Final thoughts

Organic garlic is easy to grow but it’s not cheap to buy. If you use a lot of garlic in your cooking, why not try planting some this fall. When you consider the fact that there are about five cloves per garlic head, and that each of those cloves can be grown into a garlic, it’s a financier’s dream: in one year you get back five times what you invested. Set aside a percentage of that yield to replant and you get free garlic for life, and while this will not make you rich, it will save money. Based on a conservative estimate of 2 dollars per head, my 250 garlic will cut this year’s grocery bill by 500 dollars. All that for a few hours work? That’s time well spent!