Growing Organic Garlic ｜ Ottawa Farm Fresh Organics

Howdy folks! Farmer Joe here coming at you fresh from the field. Today I want to talk about garlic and if you're a home gardener this is the perfect week to be planting garlic. Garlic is a biannual which means its life cycle is carried out over two years. You plant it in the fall and in the fall it's just going to grow. So this is a so basically each of these cloves becomes a plant. So you crack your garlic apart into separate ones so that'll make four garlic plants and then each one of these is going to grow into a big head of garlic with four to five garlics in it. And so you want to plant them in mid-October and in the fall all they're going to do is make roots. They're just going to grow roots and they're just going to survive the winter and in the spring they're going to start to grow. They're one of the first things to come up in the spring. Super satisfying to look out at your garden and seeing all these little green sprouts sticking up and the garlic will grow and in June it'll make a flower so at the top it'll make a garlic scape which is a sort of a corkscrew shaped little part that you just snip off so that you force the garlic and encourage the garlic to put all its energy down into making a nice big head of garlic and then somewhere around mid-July to early August your garlic will be ready and you'll harvest it and hang it up to dry and store it all through the winter if that's what you want to do or eat it all at once you choose. And so the planting date for garlic is really important because ideally in this fall it only grows roots and it doesn't actually come out of the ground because there is a higher chance of winter kill if your garlic has sprouted up out of the ground. That being said I know many farmers who've you know because of an unusually warm fall have had garlic sprout and grow one or two inches in the fall and lo and behold it survives just fine and over winter's just fine so if your growing conditions are good and your garlic has sprouted don't freak out it's probably gonna be okay and so that's the reason that people usually want to wait in the fall to plant it but you do want to plant it early enough that has time to get rooted and anchored in in the fall so that it resists the freezing and thawing of the spring because what happens in the spring is that as the ground freezes and thaws which with the warm days and the cold nights what can't happen is that the garlic gets lifted up and exposed out of the ground so if you plant it early enough it has time to grow some nice big roots so you want to be planting it anywhere in the first two weeks of October so this weekend is pretty much the cutoff although if we keep having this warm fall weather then you can keep going on planting we've got these big bags available at the farm store the main thing is that you want to be planting disease-free garlic so you don't want to be planting garlic with like spots and looking funky you can even get certified garlic seed which this is not this is just regular garlic you get certified garlic seed that's like tested for nematodes and this and that but seriously if you're just growing in your garden this kind of stuff is going to be just fine for you so come on by the farmers by the farm store or if you're not in Ottawa head on over to your local farmer's market pick up some nice healthy vigorous garlic and get it planted in your garden oh one more thing mulching that's the other thing so often traditionally garlic is planted in the fall you want to plant it about this deep and covered with soil and then mulched with either straw or hay or dead leaves and all these are great options it helps to protect the garlic through the winter and also helps to block the weeds in the spring and in the in the summer however it's not actually obligatory many people most commercial farms no longer use straw they just plant it directly plant it deep enough and as long as you're growing it in a well-drained soil it's that's what it needs the most what garlic really does not like is pooling water over winter because when you get water pooling in your garden and freezing into a crust of ice it asphyxiates the garlic and that's what kills your garlic in the winter so mulching is a good practice though not strictly obligatory