I had no idea it was possible to grow your own garlic until I was well into adulthood. Though I grew up in a family with a large vegetable garden, we never grew garlic.
This comes as no surprise because my dad absolutely hates garlic. No one dares to sneak it into recipes, as I swear he can taste it at a parts per billion level. Growing up, I think the only garlic I ever ate was in frozen garlic bread.
I first learned about growing garlic early in my career as an Extension Educator. Some Master Gardeners told me about their bumper crop of garlic that year, and I was intrigued.
So you guessed it, as soon as I had my own garden, my husband and I planted garlic. Like so many other home grown vegetables, nearly everyone I know, my husband and I included, finds home grown garlic to have far better flavor than anything from the grocery store.
Garlic is a member of the genus Allium, which also includes onions, leeks and chives. A garlic plant resembles an onion, with a leafy top and a bulb growing underground. Unlike an onion bulb, which is composed of several layers of tissue that are easily separated, a garlic bulb is divided into individual cloves, which are essentially young bulbs. The clove is how garlic is typically measured when cooking with garlic, and it is also how garlic is planted.
Fall is the perfect time to plant your own crop of garlic. There is an “old wives’ tale” that says to plant garlic on the first day of school and harvest it on the last day of school. It turns out this makes sense in light of how garlic grows.
Technically you can plant garlic in the very early spring with good yields, but most experts agree that yields are more reliable with a fall planting. I tried growing garlic one spring and it was a complete failure.
This is because garlic is a cool season plant. While temperatures are cool and days are short, the plant produces leaves. When temperatures rise and days lengthen, this is the signal for the garlic plant to start forming a bulb underground. Typically the tops begin to die back in June, and bulbs are harvested in July. The amount of leaf growth is directly related to the size of bulb produced—more leaves means larger bulbs.
Here in Illinois, where it seems like some years the weather jumps from forty to ninety degrees overnight, spring is only a brief pause along the way to summer. If the garlic plant does not produce enough leaves before hot weather sets in, it will not be able to form a large bulb. Adequate water while the bulb is forming in late spring influences the final size of the bulb as well.
Garlic prefers rich, well-drained soil in a sunny location. It is a good idea to add organic matter and about three pounds of balanced fertilizer per 100 square feet at planting time to encourage good leaf growth and ample bulb formation. Individual garlic cloves are planted about two inches deep and four inches apart.
Remember that the larger the clove, the larger the bulb produced. Typically, the outer cloves of a garlic bulb are larger and will produce larger bulbs than the significantly smaller inner cloves.
Types of Garlic:
- Softneck garlic has the strongest flavor and as the name implies, the bulbs have a soft “neck” of tissue. The necks are easily braided into ropes, a common way to store garlic.
- Stiffneck garlic has a milder flavor than softneck, has a very stiff neck and forms a hard stalk called a scape that has a cluster of bulblets on the tip. The bulblets are edible as is, or can be planted and will form full-sized bulbs in two years.
- Elephant garlic is in fact not a garlic but a leek that forms a very large bulb with a garlic-like flavor. It has the mildest flavor of all the garlics.
At my house, we plant garlic wherever we can squeeze it in; we’ve actually never planted it in the vegetable garden! The plant itself is nothing but some spiky green leaves, so it fits in just fine in flower borders.
I’ve never found the bulbs eaten by voles over the winter, unlike other plants in my garden. There is some evidence that garlic repels furry pests like deer, rabbits, and voles from the garden. Garlic is a main ingredient in many commercially available repellants; it certainly can’t hurt to try to use the actual plant in the same manner. It may not work, but sometimes the commercial repellants don’t work as well as advertised either. At least by growing actual garlic I should at least have some garlic to cook with in the end!
Many garden centers and mail order catalogs sell garlic bulbs for home gardens. These sources are generally more reliable than trying to use garlic from the grocery store. Garlic in the grocery store is typically treated to prevent it from sprouting and the varieties sold may not be suitable for our local climate.
If you haven’t grown your own garlic before, make this the year you give it a try—even if you have a garlic hater in your family like I did! You just may convince them to like garlic. But if not, that just means more garlic for you.
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