How To Grow GARLIC [COMPLETE GUIDE]

good afternoon gardeners it is sunday november 15th and it is a warm and overcast day here on the southeastern coast of north carolina but you know what it is a great day to plant some things in our garden and that's what we're going to do today today i'm going to show you five tips for successfully growing garlic in your garden the first tip i'm going to give you is variety selection variety selection is very important when it comes to growing garlic and the first thing you need to know is what type of garlic that you are growing there are two types of garlic out there there are hard neck types of garlic and there are soft neck types of garlic and they differ greatly based on the properties of the garlic here is an example of a hard neck garlic bulb and inside that hard neck garlic bulb you can clearly see there is a neck right here and if you squeeze it it is hard to the touch that is what gives it its name if you look at this soft neck bulb of garlic you can see that that neck that was visible in the hard neck variety is mostly absent and it is much smaller that's why they call it a soft neck now in my hands here i have two different varieties of garlic i have a hard neck variety right here and a soft neck variety right here and they grow actually very differently when it comes to growing garlic they both need considerable amounts of cold temperatures in the ground to encourage them to bulb but soft neck varieties of garlic are actually considered to be easier to grow and i think that's because they require considerably less cold temperatures to grow successfully soft neck garlic generally grows in usda hardiness zones 5 to 12. so if you live in the south like i do it's generally much easier to get a nice size of garlic with a soft neck variety in addition soft neck varieties also tend to store much better than the hard neck varieties so you can if you cure your garlic you can probably get longer shelf life out of the soft neck varieties that being said there are also advantages to hard neck varieties hard neck varieties are extremely cold hardy you can grow hard neck varieties of garlic all the way down to usda hardiness zone three they can survive something like 30 degrees below zero fahrenheit which is really extreme so if you live in far northern or far southern latitudes where you get extreme cold shots hardneck garlic is one of the things where you can probably grow them pretty successfully a disadvantage of hardneck garlic is because they need so long of a cold period they are more difficult to grow in climates with mild winters however the reason why hardneck garlics are so popular is because they tend to have very strong flavors and are considered to be in general more flavorful than many varieties of softneck garlic after you decide whether you want to grow hard neck garlic soft neck garlic or both types of garlic in your garden you then need to decide what named varieties of garlic that you want to grow some people commonly ask can i grow garlic from the grocery store and the answer is yes you can go out and you can buy an organic head of garlic break them into cloves and plant the cloves and in most cases they will grow the reason why i discourage that is because there are so many wonderful varieties of garlic out there sweet garlic spicy garlic exotic and very gourmet garlic varieties out there that you just can't get in the grocery store when you go to the grocery store you're mostly going to find very mildly flavored soft neck types because they're easy to grow and store and ship commercially and they're just not that exciting when you plant your own garlic the world is your oyster you can find all these cool unique varieties so i recommend going to a reputable seed company and buying some cool types of exotic seed garlic but read the descriptions find one that sounds attractive to you and go ahead and purchase whatever your heart desires as long as you're sure that it will grow in your climate the second tip for growing garlic is timing the proper planting of your garlic and when it comes to growing garlic timing is really everything and that is because garlic needs to be planted into the ground and exposed to certain lengths of time of freezing temperatures when you plant your seed garlic into the ground if it is too warm it is going to want to immediately send up green growth and that is not what you want you want the garlic to first put down roots and you want the green growth to be very slow it is the exposure to cold temperatures for prolonged periods of time that is going to kind of hamper that green growth and it is going to allow the roots to grow and allow it to bulb more effectively in the spring if it immediately sends out green growth you're going to get more leafy green growth on your garlic and that's not really what you want to eat you need them to bulb so it's very important that they are exposed to a sufficient length of cold temperatures this is especially critical for hard neck varieties so generally speaking the best time to plant your garlic is in the fall but a couple of weeks after you get your first frost and that is because you want things to be sufficiently cool immediately after your first frost you're usually given a longer period of warm temperatures again we really want those warm temperatures to be gone from the area and we want more consistent cold temperatures with freezing or near freezing temperatures at night so usually that's a few weeks after your first frost here in the south where i live we really need to wait until the second half of november to plant our garlic now it looks like my warm temperatures are coming to an end i have a big cold front sweeping in next week where we're probably going to see some frosts and maybe even a possible freeze at night so that's why i want to get my garlic into the ground now if you live in a more northern climate where you see freezes all throughout winter into early to mid spring you can plant your garlic in the springtime however there's a problem with that and that's because reputable seed companies usually sell their garlic in the fall so if you wait until the spring you may not be able to order any garlic if you do order your garlic in the fall and you have a way of having them stay fresh all throughout the winter you can plant them in the spring if you live in higher latitudes where you see cold temperatures all the way into mid-spring you can plant them in late winter or early spring if that's your case but if you can't source garlic that will grow for you during the back half of winter this may actually be a good time for you to go to the grocery store and actually purchase some supplemental garlic if you wish and you want more garlic to extend your harvest the third tip that i'm going to give you for successfully growing garlic is to plant the largest cloves that you can because in general the larger the clove of garlic that you plant the bigger the bulb of garlic you're going to get so right here i have a variety of hardneck garlic called spanish roja and despite it being a hard neck and i'm in a warm zone 8 climate on the coast of north carolina i grew this last year and it did pretty well for me they didn't get heads as large as the soft neck varieties did but they still produce nice heads and the flavor was incredible so i'm going to go ahead and plant that again so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to separate my clothes here and here you can see these three clothes are really nice and large clothes they should give me a pretty nice head of garlic each this is a smaller one so in theory this head of garlic from the smaller clove will be smaller so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to break up the really nice large cloves which you can see here but the little guys like this you generally don't want to plant anything like that because they're so small you're not really going to get a big head of garlic so what i'm going to do is i'm going to set them off to the side and i might plant them in a more experimental plot and just see what i get but for the time being i'm going to go ahead and separate the really nice sized ones like you see here so right here we have all of our large cloves from the seed garlic and then over here we have the smaller cloves that i'm not going to plant in the main rows but i may put in the corner of a garden and a plot that i'm not using just to see how they grow anyway because i don't really want to waste them the fourth tip that i want to give you for growing garlic is to strategically interplant your garlic with other crops garlic is fantastic because it takes up very little space in the garden but also the pungent odor of the garlic is said to keep pests away from your garden i like to interplant my garlic in between crops that have very high pest pressure and my favorite plant to intercrop with garlic is tomatoes tomatoes are my highest pest pressure crop in my garden they get attacked a lot here we have a lot of insect pressure and the garlic really does help repel insects away from the tomatoes i interplanted garlic and tomatoes last year and i had no issues with pests until i pulled the garlic out of the soil maybe that's just a coincidence because pest pressure is higher in the latter half of summer or maybe the garlic really did help i personally think that the garlic really did help one thing to remember is that garlic is very shallow rooted so you want to interplant your garlic with deeper rooted crops tomato roots go pretty deep so they don't directly compete with the garlic root so they make good companion plantings these bricks that i have spaced here will symbolize my indeterminate tomatoes that i will have growing in this space next year and i like to space my indeterminate tomatoes every two feet they get one foot on every side so i'm going to be growing my garlic exactly in between the two and here you can see i mark square feet on all of my garden beds each of those black lines on my raised bed garden here symbolizes one foot so here will be a tomato here will be a row of garlic here will be a tomato and that's how i'm going to interplant in my garden so now we have to plant our seed garlic and if you keep a mulch layer on your garden beds like i do make sure to scrape them all away because you want to plant your garlic directly in soil do not plant it in a mulch layer so now that all of the mulch has been scraped away and the soil is exposed i'm going to show you how to plant your garlic cloves now it's time to plant our seed garlic and i'm going to plant it in this trench right here and this right here is one of our garlic cloves the pointy tip is where the stalk of the garlic is going to come out of and the wide base is where the roots are going to come out of so it is very important that you orient your clove of garlic correctly so the roots grow in the proper direction so when we plant our garlic we want to make sure that there is approximately four inches of spacing at a minimum between each clove and that's because you want to make sure that you give each bowl enough room to fully develop and you also want to space them at least four inches apart from the sides of your raised beds if you're planting them in a raised bed because you don't want the raised beds to inhibit the garlic cloves ability to grow a bulb so my raised bed area right here is two feet in diameter so to get four inch spacing i'm going to plant my bulb at four inches 12 inches and 20 inches so that'll be 0 4 8 12 16 20 and then 24 so that will give me enough space so each garlic clove turns into a nice bulb and collectively we are going to want to bury our cloves about three inches deep so i'm going to go ahead and press my fingers into the soil and then make sure i orient the bulb so the top where the stalk is going to come out of is facing up and i'm going to simply press that into the ground and i'm going to do this for all three bulbs so now each bulb has been pressed in and covered completely and this is going to bring me to my fifth and final tip and the fifth and final tip is to cover your garlic cloves in a layer of compost and a layer of mulch this is why i didn't completely bury my garlic cloves to the two to three inches that i recommended and that's because i'm going to place a one inch layer of kalman or compost on top of the cloves and another one to two inch layer of a natural shredded hardwood bark mulch on top of that and the reason why you want to do this is twofold the first reason is because you want to encourage your garlic to grow roots and to slowly bulb out throughout the winter and into the spring and the best way to do that is by slow feeding them you don't want to hit them with any strong fertilizers that are going to give them a ton of growth all at once because that may redirect the energy into too much green growth so there is no better natural organic form of slow release nutrients than fully composted cow manure the second part of the equation is the mulch layer you want to insulate your soil so the soil doesn't completely freeze all the way through in many cases while hardneck garlic can really tolerate some severe freezes it's generally best to try and insulate your garden beds and also you kind of want to lock in the moisture in the soil and create even moisture and nothing does that better than a mulch layer when you purchase mulch just make sure you get yourself an organic mulch you can use shredded hardwood bark mulch like i'm using but you could also use pine bark nuggets you could use grass clippings you can use chopped up leaves you can use arborist wood chips just whatever you do don't use a dyed mulch because they're generally ground up scrap wood and pallets with chemical dyes in them you don't want to use that in your soil as long as it is a natural mulch you are good to go so what we're going to do here is we're going to open up our bagged cow manure compost we're going to take a few handfuls and we're going to put about an inch maybe a little bit more right on top of our garlic cloves and that is going to be a slow release source of nutrients that will slowly feed them throughout the winter but before i go ahead and i cover my garlic cloves with the mulch layer i want to add in a sixth bonus tip that i think will really help you throughout this process and that is to fertilize on top of your compost layer but underneath your mulch layer with an organic slow release fertilizer and what i'm using here is a three five six that's three percent nitrogen five percent phosphorus and six percent potassium uh you can use anything around a five five five just make sure that the numbers are small like this and they're close to five five five like a four five four four four four make sure that there's not big deviations in the numbers and the number that you're most interested in right here is the middle number which is phosphorus and phosphorus helps aid in root development and because we want to grow roots and the bulb itself before we grow too much greenery it's nice to supplement with a higher phosphorus feed because that will help encourage root development so all we're going to do is we're going to sprinkle a light layer of our organic slow release fertilizer on top of our trench we're going to lightly press it in to the compost layer just like that and then we are going to put our mulch layer right down on top of that and you can use fresh mulch if your bed isn't already mulched or you can just take the existing mulch like in my case and you can place it right on top of your trench just like that and the last thing you need to do is water it in and now that it's watered in one thing that we're going to want to do is we're going to want to put a tag to mark our row so we know exactly what type of garlic clove is planted here do you remember those cloves of garlic that i set aside in the earlier portion of the video and said that they're probably too small to plant to get good sized heads of garlic well i'm planting them in a smaller part of my garden with much tighter spacing my intent with these cloves is i don't expect them to get to be nice size bulbs but i still may get a few that i will be able to eat and for any of the heads of garlic that are small i'm going to save them for seed garlic for the following winter and that way i will have to buy fewer heads of garlic to plant for the next season and using those simple tips you will more than likely have a very successful harvest of garlic in your garden everybody thank you so much for watching today's video if you found it helpful please make sure to hit that like button and if you haven't already subscribed to the channel please subscribe for future updates and more videos like these if you're curious about any of the products that i use throughout my garden everything that i use is linked in my amazon storefront in the video description if you start your shopping with any of our affiliate links we do get a little piece of that pie and it helps us keep making these videos so if you could start your shopping with our links i would really appreciate that again thank you all so much for watching and i hope to see all of you again on the next video tail has the hiccups

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 42,228

Keywords: how to grow garlic, how to plant garlic, growing garlic, planting garlic, grow garlic, plant garlic, garlic, garlic growing, how to grow garlic at home, fall garlic, spring garlic, planting fall garlic, planting spring garlic, planting garlic in the fall, how to grow garlic from cloves, hardneck garlic, softneck garlic, growing hardneck garlic, growing softneck garlic, seed garlic, complete guide, garden, gardening, garden tips, organic gardening, the millennial gardener

Id: 1i5Nk3gWzos

Length: 17min 45sec (1065 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020