$1 vs $30 Garlic- How to Grow Infinite Garlic for Nearly Free!.

Gardening is a non-stop learning experience. No matter how long we have been doing it, we will learn new things. And in this video, the result is the exact opposite of what I thought would happen. I don't recommend anybody ever do this. It's horrible. I definitely learned something here, and this has dispelled quite a few myths for me. I don't even know what to say, but that's why I make these videos. If you've ever purchased seed garlic online, you know how expensive they are. Just buying three or so heads of garlic can run you as much as $30 or more with shipping and handling and tax included. Can't we just go to the grocery store and buy $1 garlic and plant that instead and save a whole lot of money? Well, we have all been told that the reason why the expensive specialty garlic online is so expensive is because it's better. It's spicier. It's stronger. They have bigger heads, so you're going to get a much, much better product than planting the boring, old, commercial, mild stuff from the grocery store. So I put this conventional wisdom to the test. I planted expensive specialty garlic right next to $1 grocery store garlic, and I waited all year long to see what is truly better. This experiment has been seven months in the making, and the result has blown my mind. The specialty garlic that I am growing in this video is a hardneck variety called music, which I purchased several years ago for a hefty price. But what I do is I save the biggest heads of garlic all year long, and then I replant them in the fall because the biggest cloves that you plant will then make the biggest heads for the next season. As for the grocery store garlic, I just went to my local Trader Joe's and I bought whatever they had. There is no way that I could know what variety they are, and it's probably going to be different at every single grocery store. You just have no way of knowing. But if it is good, you could always save the biggest heads and the biggest cloves until the following fall to plant them again if you really like it. So now we are going to turn the clock back to last fall. It's November 30th, and I'm going to start this video by planting a rare variety of highly sought after hardneck garlic called music. That's music, not music. It's named after a person, Al Musick. And I've had the Musick garlic sitting in my refrigerator in this brown paper bag, cold vernalizing for eight weeks, and it is now ready to plant. But before we plant it, we need to remove that garlic paper and expose the cloves. So to do that, I'm going to dump it all inside a mixing bowl because if we do that and we shake it up, it is going to easily and quickly remove the garlic paper. Watch this. So after we shake that up really hard for a while, we open that up and we see a bunch of that garlic has been separated. So then we're just going to pick out the individual cloves. This is effective at getting about 90% of that garlic paper off. Just look at that. Isn't that cool? Now we must plant our garlic, and it's critical that we plant the garlic cloves in this orientation because this is the root side that the roots will come out of, and this is the top side that the greenery will shoot out of. In fact, you can actually see some of these cloves starting to sprout because they have been in storage since June. So because they're getting old, the green tops are starting to form. When planting garlic, we want to plant only the largest cloves because the largest cloves will make the largest heads of garlic. So in this mixing bowl right here, I have segregated 54 of the largest cloves for planting. And then right here, I have a bunch of inferior cloves that I'm not going to plant. I'm just going to take them inside and chop them up and store them in olive oil for use in my kitchen. So we're going to dig a series of trenches about 8 to 12 inches apart. And then in those trenches, we are going to plant our garlic cloves about 2 inches deep with the tops facing up and the wide root bottoms facing down. We're going to space each individual clove about 4 to 6 inches. That way, we give each bulb ample amount of room to form nice and large. And here is what our garlic cloves look like once they have all been planted. You can see they are all standing straight up. They are buried about 2 inches deep. And this gives you a pretty good idea as to what the spacing should be. You want to have wide enough spacing that you give the roots enough room to breathe and grow nice and large. And now we're going to run the whole procedure again with our grocery store garlic. I simply went to one of my local grocery stores and I bought a couple of heads of garlic that were selling for $0.50 a piece. So I spent $1 on what is in this brown paper bag. And just like I did with my other garlic, this has been sitting in the vegetable crisper of my refrigerator for going on 6 to 8 weeks to get some cold vernalization. So I wanted a fair apples to apples comparison. And here are the two beautiful heads of garlic that I got from my grocery store. We're going to see how these perform. So I'm going to do the same thing. Place them in the mixing bowl and I'm going to shake the heck out of them. And that has stripped a fair amount of the garlic paper off. So now I'm going to finish separating them. And there is all of our peeled grocery store garlic. And these cloves aren't nearly as big as the named varieties, but we would expect that. But what's very interesting is almost all of these have started to sprout. So grocery store garlic is probably a lot older than you think it is. So we are going to do the same thing we did before. We are going to plant the garlic cloves in the other trench I made spaced about 4 to 6 inches apart. Now that the cloves are planted, I'm going to amend the trenches with fertilizers. I'm going to first add this all-purpose granular organic fertilizer to all of the trenches. I'm going to use this Espoma Plantone, but anything around a 5-5-5 NPK will be just fine. And then I will heavily dust all of the trenches with bone meal. This is a natural source of phosphorus and calcium that is critical for strong root development. And it will help produce big bulbs. First I'm going to start with the granular organic fertilizer and I am going to generously amend each trench. Don't be cheap with this because this granular organic fertilizer is what we are going to mostly rely on to slowly break down all throughout the winter and feed our garlic plants. So we want to make sure we add enough to get them through several months. Then we are going to follow up with another generous dusting of bone meal. Bone meal is going to break down very slowly over the course of the wintertime because the soil will be very cool and the microbiology will be slow. So again, don't be cheap with this. This is the calcium and phosphorus that the roots are going to demand and it's going to pay dividends to be generous with this to help you get bigger bulbs come spring. Now we will close up all of the trenches. We will gently pass over the trenches and pinch them together, covering each individual garlic clove with about 2 inches of soil. After we are done pinching all of the trenches shut, we will take our hands and we will tamp down the soil lightly to make sure that there are no air gaps and there is no settlement. I also recommend you wear gloves when applying these products because they are very dry and they can be a little bit caustic to your skin. After all of the trenches have been backfilled and tamped down, I am then going to spread compost all over the raised bed where I just planted the garlic. This is going to add about 1 inch of compost evenly spread along the entire garden bed where the garlic trenches are. After that compost has been spread, I am then going to put down another 2 inches of a natural mulch. I am going to be using a blend of old partially rotted wood chips and some old rotting bales of wheat straw that I have had sitting out in the sun and rain decomposing for several months. This is going to add about another 2 to 3 inches total of compost and mulch burying those garlic cloves. So at the end of the day, the garlic is going to be buried something like 3 to 4 inches deep when all is said and done. And here is what the garlic bed looks like now that it has been completely mulched. And in case you didn't notice, I also threw all of the garlic paper on top of the bed. And I am very happy to report that I had so much old wood chips, I didn't even need the old wheat straw. So I will save that for something else. And now we must generously water in our garlic bed. And this is critical for two reasons. First we need to make sure that there are no air pockets left in that trench. So watering will help collapse any small air pockets we may have missed. And also we want to facilitate the breakdown of organic fertilizers and they won't break down unless they are moist. So be generous with this initial irrigation. And if you are wondering why this end row in the raised garden bed is empty, that's because I am going to plant some bulbing onions in there when they are ready for transplant in a few weeks. So the next time you see this raised garden bed there will be a row or two of onions there. So now all we are going to do is wait to start seeing germination. And if you are in a warmer zone like 8 or 9, you can start to see germination and some garlic greens poking through the soil in as little as 2 to 3 weeks. But if you live in a colder zone, it may take a few months for the garlic to actually start sprouting. So we'll check in later and we'll see how this bed is performing. By the way, if you are enjoying this video, please consider subscribing to the channel. YouTube has deprioritized long format videos to make room for more shorts content this year. So between all the shorts that they are more heavily promoting and all the crazy AI videos that have hit the platform, it's been really hard for us long form content creators to find new audiences. So if you like videos like this that are made by real human beings, please consider subscribing and also hit the like button and leave a comment down in the comment section because all those things do a lot to help distribute it further across the platform. I really appreciate your support. It's January 31st and today is the perfect time to do our first check in on our garlic plants because we are about to get all time snow and cold here in Wilmington, North Carolina. Up to 8 inches of ice and snow and a low as cold as 12. So this is the kind of weather here that will go in the record books. And for those of you up north that think this is no big deal, well this would be like sending a category 3 hurricane right into New York City. So it's all relative to what your infrastructure is and what your average weather is. So the snowstorm is just starting to form and you can see we are getting pelted by the first little sleep balls right there, but our garlic is coming along just fine. If I squat down here you can see this is all the moosa garlic that I planted and we have had possibly the coldest winter I've ever experienced here on average in southeastern North Carolina. We've had so far 4 nights below 20 degrees and we're likely to get a series of 3 more nights deep into the teens, as cold as 12 degrees, maybe even as low as 10. And as you can see all of the garlic is just doing fantastic. We have virtual 100% germination, if not 100% germination. Now let's check on the grocery store garlic on the other side. Since I planted my garlic in the fall you'll also notice I put in another row of winter onions and that's what you see right here. So don't get confused by those winter onions. This row right here on the closest end is the grocery store garlic and as you can see that grocery store garlic also has virtual, if not 100% germination. Every little bit seems to have come up. Perhaps I have one little dead spot right here. So I may have had one clove of garlic that did not come up, but the grocery store garlic is just not going to be of the same quality of the stuff I save myself. So it's always better to do things yourself the right way, but as you can see everything looking beautiful and I have no doubt at all that all of that garlic is going to sail through all of this cold. Garlic is virtually invincible. It's March 28th, we made it through a brutal winter, the coldest I have ever experienced here in southeastern North Carolina and the garlic looks absolutely incredible. These 3 rows right here in the front are the moosic garlic and they all look incredible and then the one over here, the 4th row, that is the grocery store garlic and of course we have some onions that I planted in late winter over here that are not mulched, so we can ignore them for the purposes of this video, but boy do they look fantastic too. And I cannot see any difference at all in any of the garlic. Both the named moosic variety that is quite expensive is growing just as well as the grocery store garlic. Everything looks tremendous. So I think I'm going to crouch down and get a gauge of the stalks. So that moosic garlic right there has some really thick stalkage. That is incredible. They look so good. Then here is the grocery store garlic. If I compare them side by side, some of them do have really thick stalks like this one right here, but some of them are a little bit thinner, which makes sense I guess because the moosic garlic is a little bit more choice than the stuff I grabbed randomly from the grocery store that had smaller heads and cloves. So this is mainly me in action because the stuff I saved for planting was the primo big stuff and the stuff they sell at grocery stores is just whatever they can get money for. So naturally my garlic is better than what they're selling to the masses as a commercial product. So I think that probably explains that, but otherwise there's not a whole lot of difference considering your grocery store garlic costs a dollar and the name varieties cost considerably more than that. It's June 7th and at long last I finally get to harvest my garlic and answer the question what is better, $30 specialty garlic or $1 grocery store garlic. Now we know our garlic is ready because it has turned significantly brown. It is mostly dyed back, but it hasn't turned completely brown. There's still a little bit of green and that is exactly what we want. Now I also dug around the base of a few of the bulbs just to make sure the bulbs have formed. So you want to do that as well. But if you see nice formed bulbs and you see the garlic starting to naturally dye back, that is how you know that they are ready for harvest. And it looks like the grocery store garlic, which is the row in front here, it is a little bit further advanced than the moosic garlic in the back. But nevertheless we are going to harvest it and we are going to compare the garlic based on the size and quality of the bulbs, not the quantity because we planted over three times more of the moosic garlic than we did the grocery store garlic. So we will start by harvesting the grocery store garlic first and we don't want to harvest the garlic by grabbing the neck and just pulling it up because the neck is dying back. This will work some of the time, but also some of the time the neck will snap off and then you'll lose the head of garlic somewhere under the soil. So I actually like to dig down a little bit and try and get my hand up under and pop the garlic head out. Wow, that's the grocery store head of garlic right there. That's pretty nice looking. That's pretty impressive for a couple of cents a clove. So I'm going to follow this procedure and go up and down the row of the grocery store garlic and we will see what kind of harvest we get. Wow, wow, wow. I am blown away by how nice most of these grocery store garlic heads are. I didn't think that it would turn out this well. I am so impressed right now. Now we are going to harvest our specialty moosic garlic. And again, we're not judging things based on quantity here because I planted a lot more of these. We are judging things based on the quality of the head. So we're going to follow the same procedure and then we'll rinse them off and we'll compare. So if this tells you anything, I'm actually a little bit disappointed with the size of some of the heads of garlic. Maybe I was starting to pull some of these a little bit too early and these may be a little bit too green. So I've decided to let the greenest ones sit in the soil for a couple of more weeks and let them die back more. Maybe I can get a little bit better head size. Some of them are pretty nice, but also some of them, this one's just a dud, some of these are definitely undersized. So that could be my bad or maybe it just wasn't the greatest year for garlic. Not quite sure, but this is not blowing my mind. I'm not as impressed, believe it or not. Now I'm going to lay them out in my grass and I'm going to wash them off lightly with some water. I specifically picked a dry day to do this garlic harvest. Normally, most people would not want to wash off their garlic cloves. What they would do is they would let them sit out in the sun and dry and then rub the dirt off. But I washed my cloves last year and let them sit out in the sun for 24 hours and it worked out perfectly. We're having very hot, dry weather, so I'm just going to let them sit out on the tarp and air dry and I'll flip them over before I go to bed tonight, let them completely dry and sit out in the sun tomorrow morning as well before I bring them into my garage to help them cure. And these are the heads of grocery store garlic. Absolutely beautiful. Are these the biggest heads of garlic that I have ever grown? No, but I paid a dollar for all of these. And I bought little tiny grocery store heads, not the specialty seed garlic heads, which are the biggest ones, because the bigger the garlic cloves, the bigger heads you're going to get. So the fact that I bought inferior garlic from the grocery store for basically no money and I got this incredible harvest right here, I am absolutely thrilled. This is spectacular. And here is the moussic garlic that I just picked. Some of the heads are absolutely massive, like that beauty right there, but some are a little undersized like that right there. And that could be that I just pulled some of these heads of garlic a little bit too prematurely. So now that I have looked over all of the different heads of garlic, I'm very surprised and thrilled to say the grocery store garlic is about identical in terms of size and quality as the fancy moussic garlic that I planted right here. But that being said, I want you to understand something. I live in Zone 8B, coastal North Carolina, where we have mild short winters and we have long hot summers. Garlic is overwhelmingly a cold winter climate vegetable, if you want to call it a vegetable, especially when it comes to hardneck varieties. I'm not supposed to be growing hardneck varieties here. I only do it because I'm able to trick the garlic with the cold vernalization trick in the refrigerator. So really, I shouldn't be growing this. And I still have, for the most part, beautiful results. So the results of this does not show that grocery store garlic is better. It shows that whether you get specialty garlic or buy garlic from the grocery store, it will grow. And you shouldn't think that one is necessarily more productive than the other, as long as it is climate appropriate. The reason that you would get these specialty garlics and pay extra for them in general is because they are supposed to have superior flavor. They are supposed to be stronger, spicier, zestier than generally the milder garlic varieties that they sell at grocery stores for a mass audience that they don't want to offend with really strong garlic flavor. So let's put that to the test. Put what to the test? Well, we have always been told that grocery store garlic is milder than the expensive specialty garlics that we order online. But have you ever seen a garlic taste test? Well, here I have some grocery store garlic where a lot of the garlic paper came off, and that is not going to be able to be stored. And then same thing here. We have an inferior clove of the moosic garlic where the garlic paper came off. So we can peel these cloves back and taste test them and see if the story is really true. Who would be crazy enough to do a garlic taste test? Well, my wife's on a work trip, so she's not going to be home for a couple of days. So what do I care, I guess? All right, I guess. Well, they say the grocery store garlic varieties are milder. So let's give this a try, and I'll peel the paper off the outside of the clove. This would have been a lot easier had I not wet things down. And that right there is a clove of grocery store garlic. I don't recommend anybody ever do this. It's horrible. That tastes like garlic. It's very potent. Very spicy. Oh, this is going to be so uncomfortable. So that's really delicious. If you don't do something stupid like eat the whole clove. That is extremely garlicky, extremely crunchy, extremely fresh, very spicy. But then again, I have nothing to compare it to. So I guess we're going to compare it. Oh, this is going to hurt my stomach so badly. We have nothing to compare it to. So I guess we have to try the moosic garlic. That is the moosic garlic. I don't think I'm going to eat the whole clove again. That was too much. Very different flavor. Surprisingly, not nearly as spicy. It is much more fresh, crisp. It didn't blow out my stomach like the other one did. So believe it or not, the moosic garlic, not nearly as garlicky, at least on a head-to-head taste test. And I'm not going to do another one. So that is what it is. So now I literally don't know what to believe. I've always been told that the reason why we pay 30 times more for the specialty seed garlic online versus just planting the stuff at the grocery store is because that stuff is so much more gourmet. It's so much more garlicky and stronger. But that specialty garlic, it wasn't rough on my stomach at all. That piece of grocery store garlic was like eating Satan's toenail. It was absolutely, horrifically spicy and garlicky. At least 10 times more powerful than the specialty garlic. So color me impressed. That's going to be with me for days, and my stomach is probably going to hurt for the next 12 hours. So I hope this was worth it. I definitely learned something here, and this has dispelled quite a few myths for me. I am absolutely blown away that I got basically the same size bulbs out of $1 grocery store garlic that I picked up. And it's more powerful and way more flavorful than the specialty stuff. I just, I don't even know what to say, but that's why I make these videos. Here is my recommendation now that I've thought things through. If you're new to growing garlic, go out and spend a little bit of money and try two to three different types of specialty garlic based on the descriptions that you read on different websites and give them a try. But also plant alongside them a few different varieties from a grocery store. Go to two or three different grocery stores and pick out something that they have there. And then plant all of them alongside each other and then evaluate them all independently. Then at the end of the day, if you walk away with two varieties that you really like, keep the largest heads for replanting the following October or November or whenever you plant your garlic. That's what I've always typically done. I have always typically saved a bunch of the moose at garlic year after year for fall planting, but that grocery store variety was so strong. I honestly think I'm going to save some of them for replanting as well. So everybody, I sure hope you found this video enjoyable and you learned something from it. Lord knows I definitely did. So I hope it was worth it. If you did enjoy this video, please make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel and please ring the notification bell. So you're notified when I release more videos like these for all of the products that I use to grow garlic. I place direct links down in the video description for your convenience for everything else I use in real life in my yard and garden that is linked in my Amazon storefront in the video description. While you're down there, check out my website, themillennialgardener.com for all things gardening and custom home design merch. If you want to support my channel, thank you all so much for watching. And I hope to see all of you again on the next video. Ellie, look at this little swamp puppy over there. We have a little baby swamp puppy. Aw, he's just a little guy. He may only be about three or four feet long. Dale don't care. He's too busy sniffing. There must be something good in that grass right there. Bye swamp puppy. We're getting back to our walk. Beautiful day, but it's hot.