Getting Garlic in the Ground

When I think of planting season I generally think of spring, as would most people.  As I learn more about gardening, I have learned that there are some exceptions to that rule.  One of them being that garlic does best when planted in the fall.  Garlic is a bulb and like most early spring bulbs, they must be planted before the ground freezes for the winter.  Once they are in the ground, they can go about the important business of building up their root system which comes in handy when it's time to send up shoots in early spring.

Since I am breaking ground on a new garden this fall it made the most sense to start with the bed I was going to plant garlic in.  In the beginning it looked like this:

This is where the garden is going to be located.  Pretty much a blank slate.  I know that it seems a little close to that pine tree, but I think in the summer (which gets fairly hot here)  the plants will appreciate a little afternoon shade.  The area that the garlic bed is going to fill is in the middle of the whole garden. 

The first task was to mark off the area that was going to be the bed.  For this I just used a few pieces of rebar and some twine.  I did my best to make the bed three feet by ten feet.  I have found in the past that this bed size is ideal for making hoop houses over with pvc pipe and painter's plastic.

The next step was to add compost to the soil.

For this bed I settled on two bags of mushroom compost.  I had planned on using horse manure from some friends of mine, but right now I don't have a good way to transport as much as I would need to use.  

With the compost spread evenly over the bed, I then proceded to turn the bed over using my handy dandy shovel.  This was the most labor intensive part of the whole thing mostly because of all the river rock throughout the bed.  I had a hard time digging as deep as I would have liked, but I was able to remove a good deal of rock so the soil was in pretty good shape by the time I was done. 

Here it is all blended nicely and raked smooth for planting.  

The next step was spacing the garlic cloves in preparation for planting.  I did a little homework on what the ideal spacing is for garlic and there is a bit of a range so I took the middle ground.  I planted my cloves about six inches apart in a grid.

This is why I like to use a wide bed method to my garden.  I can fit many more plants in a bed like this than I could planting them all in their own rows with walking space inbetween.  I think the total number of cloves I planted was somewhere around 90.  About half of them came from garlic that I had saved from this summer's harvest back in Illinois.  I made sure to save the biggest and best heads of garlic for this purpose.  The other half is made up of a couple of varieties that I bought from the local farmers market.  I think one is a red skinned soft neck variety and the other is some type of hardneck garlic.

Once I had the spacing all plotted out, I went through and pushed each clove into the ground a couple of inches (making sure that the pointed side was facing up).

Once all the cloves were nestled into the bed I gently leveled the soil once again making sure to fill in all the holes.  Then I mulched the whole bed with some straw.  The straw will help protect the garlic from the harsh winter weather and hopefully keep the frost from heaving them out of the ground.

At some point I want to get a small hoop house up over this bed to help protect the young garlic, though it would probably be just fine without it. For right now it is probably just fine to leave it uncovered so the bed can absorb any rain that comes in the next few weeks.  I may add another layer of mulch when the weather starts to get cold in the next few weeks, but for now I am considering this bed to be complete.