Planting Garlic

The fall season is well underway, and though most of the garden is winding down, I still have one crop left to plant this year: Garlic!  We have had a few frosts though the weather has been warm this week, so I thought the time was perfect for getting another crop of garlic into the ground.

The first step in the process was preparing the bed for another crop.  This bed has been busy this year and has grown a crop of peas this spring, and a crop of turnips and beets in late summer.  Now that those crops are out of the bed I needed to amend the soil a bit before I planted my garlic.  I didn't have much in the way of compost that I could add, but I did sprinkle a layer of ashes from my fire pit (from burning loads of ragweed) and a layer of composting grass clippings that I had.  I am hoping the grass clippings break down a bit over the winter and add some organic matter to this soil which is largely hard clay and river rocks.

This is the bed after I pulled the beets.  I did my best to break up the large clumps of soil and removed any large rocks that I came across.  After turning the soil over, the bed was ready for planting.

I raked out any left over weeds and large clumps of soil, then raked it as smooth as I could.  I added a third drip line to the bed and then started laying out the garlic cloves in a grid across the bed.  I think I was able to get a clove every six inches or so and ended up planting 105 cloves total of three different varieties.  I don't know what the varieties are called, but there is a red soft neck, a red hard neck and a white hard neck.  The red hard neck is a new variety this year that I got at the local farmer's market to round out my bed.  

After all the cloves were properly planted I turned on the water to make sure that the drip irrigation was working well for this bed.  I am glad that I checked because two of the lines for this bed barely dripped at all, so I fixed them by poking new holes every few inches with a thumb tack.  Now I know that this bed will be well watered.

The last step was to mulch the bed.  Again I used a bunch of composting grass clippings to cover the bed because that is what I had on hand.  The grass clippings will keep the moisture in the bed and protect the newly planted garlic from extreme temperatures.

In the spring I will help the garlic shoots poke through the thick mulch, but will leave it on the bed so that it helps to reduce the number of weeds that want to grow in this bed.  I hope that next summer's garlic crop is big and healthy.  I am trying to give it the best head start that I can.