Fall Garlic Planting

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Today we're going to talk to you about planting garlic. You won't see much of me in this short video. That's a big loss. But we are going to show you what it takes to plant garlic. As you can see, I have right here a little square foot garden bed, a four by four. It's divided up into approximate one square foot sections. And I like to plant garlic, oh, in early fall. And here we are on the mountain west of the United States. It's early October. And if you look close in this bed, you can already see some garlic coming up that was part of leftover garlic before, where I still had some cloves in the ground. We actually had an early snow last week, and all of these are out here in the snow. There's about two inches of snow on these, and they were just standing up through it. Garlic does fine, generally speaking, in that kind of weather. But I'm going to talk to you about planting this right here in the fall, and so that in the spring, you can enjoy a nice crop of garlic. Garlic is really easy to plant. You can get garlic cloves from the store, however, be aware that many times there's been an inhibitor that's been put on them, a hormone that's used to reduce sprouting. So it may inhibit the sprouting that you get, but if you go to some type of like Whole Foods or Sprouts or Sunflower Market, the co-op, you're more likely to get some garlic that doesn't have those inhibitors and that they'll grow. Now let's get to the practical matters here. If you notice, this is a whole bulb of garlic, and this is fairly sizable. There's different types, hard neck, soft neck, etc. That's another video. We're just going to get into planting these. And if you look, you can see these come apart fairly easily. You get the paper off of them, and you can see the individual cloves in there. And something to think about, or to keep in mind related to garlic, is that whatever size of clove you break out, the larger the clove, the larger the following year's plant. There's a direct correlation between the two. So if I use one of these right here, I'm going to get a small garlic. It's certainly going to be edible, and I'm pretty conservative about throwing away plant material, so I'm not going to pitch that or put it in the compost pile. I'll go ahead and plant it. But I'm going to get a small bulb off of it next year. These larger bulbs that you see from my previous year were large cloves, and this is what they produce. And something that's interesting, as you can see, as I break it apart, you can actually see the stalk, where I cut it off and let it dry, and it goes through to the root mass at the bottom. And you can see very clearly these cloves that are created. So this is a really nice clove. Look at the size of that. Let's get to planting. I like to plant about five cloves per square. Now you can do four, you can do nine. Just my personal preference is about five, especially if I'm planting sizable cloves. And what you're going to end up with is some good space around them. And in the spring, in late spring, how you'll know that they're ready is they'll yellow out on the top. And when over half of them are yellow and the tops fall over, then it's time to harvest and dry them. We'll do another video on it. But let's just look at the planting. All right, so here I have this square foot area. You can see this has been amended with lots of organic material. If I dig down in it, you can see there's plenty of moisture, plenty of humus in this right here to make this a successful bed. And so I'm going to take off some of the more rough stuff and get it out of there. Planting is real easy. You're simply going to dig down, get about an inch and a half to two inches down. Put the garlic point up as it's oriented, just the way it would be in the entire bulb. You're going to put the clove up. If you put it upside down like this, the plant's going to be confused. It'll waste energy coming around and trying to get the shoot out the top. It does have polarity, so just place it just like that. Cover it and firm it. And you're just going to go like this, right around. Here's the next one. I'm going to plant one right in the middle here. Again, polarity. Plant it down. There's number four. Almost blew it right there. Okay, I'm going to put that down there. Not that it'd be fatal, it just wastes a significant amount of plant energy trying to get right it up. Alright, and then we're going to do this last one right here. And I have just planted one square foot of garlic. And in the spring, we'll take some photos and video of this and show you how these have done. If you enjoyed this video, found it helpful, please like it, pass it on to someone else you know can make use of the information. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from www.DirtFarmerJay.com.