Fall Garlic Planting

hadar farmer J here from Dirt Farmer J calm 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 battle 4x4 it's divided up into approximately one square foot sections and I like to plant garlic oh and 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 and we actually had an early snow last week and all of these were out here in the snow there was 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 and 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 a 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 coop 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 a whole bulb of garlic and this is fairly sizable there's different types hard hard neck soft necks 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 years plant there's a direct correlation between the two so if I use one of these right here I'm gonna get a small garlic it's certainly gonna be edible and I'm a pretty conservative about throwing away plant material so I'm not gonna pitch that or put in the compost pile or go and plant it but I'm gonna get a small bulb off of the next year these larger bulbs that you see from my previous year were two large cloves and this is what they produce and some of the tenor recipes 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 close look at the size of that let's get to planting I like to plan about five cloves per square and do for 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 a late spring how you'll know that they're ready is the yellow out on the top and when over half of them are yellow and the the tops fall over then it's time to harvest and dry them we'll do another video on let's just look at the planning all right so here I have this the square foot area you can see this has been amended with lots of organic material but dig down in it you can see there's a plenty of of moisture plenty of houmous and that's right here to make this a successful bed and so I'm gonna take off some of the more rough stuff and get it out there planning is real easy you're simply gonna dig down get about oh in two 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 plants going to be confused it'll waste energy coming around and trying to get the chute out the top it does have polarity so just place it just like that cover it and firm it and you're just gonna go like this right around here's the next one and a plant one right in the middle here again polarity plant it down there's number four almost blew it right there okay we're gonna 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 gonna 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 from RJ from dirt from jail