How to Grow Garlic

Hi I'm Jarrett from Stone Soup Farm and this is how to plant garlic. Garlic is an unusual crop in that it is seeded from actual garlic cloves as opposed to seed and it is planted in the Fall usually. The best time to plant is after it starts to frost but before it gets so cold that you can't work the soil any more. To prepare your seed bed it is good to have raised beds if you can, get it nice and clean and well tilled maybe with a rototiller or by hand and incorporate as much compost or manure as you can into the soil. Once you have a raised bed like that it is good to mark out rows. The rows should be about 18 inches apart and once you have that you take your seed garlic which is just the cloves and plant them in the ground with the bottom of the bulb down so they are oriented the way it would be if the bulb was sticking straight up and press them into the soil about an inch below the surface and put them within the rows at about six inch spacings so you are planting them every six inches within the row. Then give them a light cover so that they are covered by about a half an inch to an inch of soil like that and then you are going to want to mulch them because they have to over Winter and they can survive even in very cold Winters. Garlic is an amazing plant. Mulches can be straw, hay, or even just lawn leaves like this and so what you are going to want to do is take the leaves, spread them out over the surface and cover everything. The leaves are acting both as a mulch to prevent any Winter damage on those really really cold nights and it is also going to be a weed suppressor in the Spring. You spread it out, you want the mulch to be about an inch thick and nice and even and try not to get any exposed soil because any soil exposed is not going to have that mulch for protection or for weed suppression. In the Spring the garlics are going to start to poke their little heads out, they'll germinate and they're going to send out these little shoots and you might go through and check and make sure that the shoots are finding their way through the mulch. Once they are you are golden. They'll grow all season and when the plants start to have leaf die back you pull the garlic out, put it in a warm dry place and it will cure and later on you can clip the top off and you've got your garlic. So I'm Jarrett from Stone Soup Farm and that's how you grow garlic.