How to Plant Garlic (Fall Garlic Planting)

hey you guys this is josh with homesteading family and today i'm going to be showing you how to plant [Music] garlic [Music] all right so before we can plant garlic you got to know a little bit about the types of garlic and what you're going to plant there are essentially two types of garlic there's hardneck and they're soft neck garlic and the hardness garlic now there's a ton of varieties in each of these okay so we're not going to get into that today but you need to know the difference between hardneck and softneck hard neck is generally a larger clove and it generally is better suited to cooler climates and it better generally has a stronger or better flavor it's a more flavorful garlic and it also grows escape and escape is a little flowering bulb at the top that is also edible that a lot of foodies and culinary people really like but but it's that's one of the main differences just that it's a cooler climate garlic it's larger and it is stronger flavored or better flavored and those those types of varieties and then the soft neck is does a little better in a warmer climate and it's not as flavorful but it's a much better store it stores a lot longer and a lot better so you've got to know what you want to plant what's generally best is know a little bit about your climate or your warmer climate cooler climate and and then try both and try different varieties of both to find out what you like and then you can start leaning towards some of the things that both grow well for you and that you like the flavor of okay so next you got to know when to plant garlic and generally that's going to be in the early fall late september or you know in october certainly by the end of october in most climates we're mid-october now getting these in if you can get them in a little bit earlier it's fine the exact timing really depends on your environment but the goal of what you're trying to do is get them in the ground get them rooted a little bit but you do not want those shoots to be popping through the surface for the winter you want those to stay underground and then they're going to get a very very early start in the spring and take advantage of that long spring season to get you the best sized bulb now if it gets to be too late in the season too late in the window and you're starting to get too cold to plant garlic you can plant it in the spring you want to get it in as soon as the ground is workable for you and it will grow and you'll still get a harvest your your um your overall bulbs are just going to be smaller so fall you know target your the um fall equinox is a great time to get it in right there some climates maybe a little bit earlier not a problem generally if it's a little bit later like we're doing here in late october but that is that's the best time okay so next you want to properly prepare your soil and garlic likes loose light soil that is not very wet and it's also a heavy feeder it needs a lot of nutrition okay so your soil needs to really be built up well now i practice a no-till system here so you're either going to want to till the soil before you plant the garlic or at least get it prepped and in my case i do not till and so what we're doing is broad forking the soil here and this is going to loose it up i've already laid down a layer of compost we're going to broad fork this smooth out the beds and then add another layer of compost because i'm still building up my soil here and i really really want to feed the soil for this garlic that's going in here now if you've been following along with me here at home stating family for very long you know i'm a proponent of low to no till and there's a lot of ways to work the soil without continually mixing the soil up and turning it over and in these permanent raised beds i've got here this broad fork is great this is just going to loosen up the soil we added some compost to this several weeks ago over the top after shaping the beds and this is just helping us to loosen the soil up really really important for that garlic okay it doesn't like heavy soils if you've got clay soils you really got to make sure and loosen it up and and these raised beds are a real benefit uh because you don't want them sitting in water so we'll just finish this row real quick and then we'll get to amending it okay so after you've got your soil loosened up prepped you want to be making sure that you've got you're building up your soil fertility okay garlic is a very heavy feeder and so this is a great time either to add additional compost which is what i do i don't don't generally do a whole lot of fertilization certainly no chemical fertilizers sometimes i'll add some organic fertilizer uh complete organic fertilizer which is great if you want a great recipe for that you can just google that along with a steve solomon he's got a great recipe i've used for a lot a lot of years i don't have any this year so we're just going to add some extra compost to really help the garlic out and we'll get this bed amended and then get ready to plant some garlic [Music] alrighty so last step before we get to planting the garlic here you can see connor's laying it out ahead of us is to prepare your garlic which there really isn't much to it if you're buying seed garlic it's going to come already broken up into cloves like this ready to go this is all garlic that we grew ourselves and so we had to take the bulbs break the stems off after it had been cured and just break them off and and you know peel off a lot of the holes now you want to leave some of the hole on them you don't need to strip it down just to the bare garlic and that's really it it's ready to go all right so you know what this is actually the easiest part there's just a couple things you need to know garlic you want to plant it with the fat end or the root end down okay that's really really important in the skinny end or this is where it's going to shoot up up so you want to plant it vertically like that and then we'll get to putting it in the ground in a second you want to space it roughly four to six inches apart it kind of depends on your soil how rich is your soil you know if you're kind of depleted and and struggling with your soil then space them out six inches or a little bit better if you've got really good soil then they can go up to four and a rule of thumb that you can use um you can either use like what connor's down there he's using a three foot ruler to lay them out you can also just use your hand generally your hand is about four you know to six inches somewhere in there and that's a great rule of thumb if you want to go real quick you can just lay it down and you can even use your thumb some people do i'm going to do something a little different to make a hole and put it in cover it over that's it now i prefer to use my little spade here and just come along you don't have to do much just drop it in cover it up garlic is really really easy if your soil is nice and loose like it ought to be you can see how quick this goes and it's a good thing because we've got a 66 foot row here and garlic at every four inches that's about 600 cloves of garlic we're gonna plant all right so we're getting down to the last garlics here i think we put in about 500 i was hoping about 600 so we ran a little short but that's okay one more thing just to reiterate fat end or rue down in down skinny end up this one's not quite so skinny they're not all perfectly shaped but skinny end up about two inches down and four to six inches apart and we've got some garlic planted for the season now there's a couple more things you need to know all right so your garlic's in the ground um let's talk about watering real quick if you have moist soil like our climate and rains are coming you really shouldn't have to worry about watering till maybe next summer but it depends on your environment if you're very dry just go ahead and give it a good watering right now and you want to give it about an inch a week until you start getting some rain okay so a couple of last tips that you need to know um garlic does not like a lot of competition so you've got to make sure and keep your beds weeded if you're doing a no-till raised bed system like this is that becomes really easy because we're just not bringing seeds to the surface and likely if you're planting in the fall you're probably not going to have to do a lot of weeding right now but when spring gets going if you start seeing weeds come in here you just want to come and get them up when they're small and just prevent that competition with the garlic and another solution for that that solves a couple issues is mulching you can also mulch and that's a great idea you know i like to generally keep the soil covered either with a wood chip mulch or even just with heavy composting is great too if you're in a really really cold climate you may want to mulch just to protect these garlics these garlic cloves going in to winter but that also is going to help you retain moisture and slow down the uh weed pressure so mulching is a great way you can do two to four inches of mulch and that's about it guys garlic is really a under utilized herb is what it is on the homestead i think a lot more people should grow it it's great to be throwing in so much of your food for added flavor and of course it is full of health benefits carolyn uses it in lots of different tinctures and things to help keep us well and and it's really easy to grow you just don't have to do much to it it's going to sit here for you a little bit of weeding and then you're gonna harvest around summer solstice around late june and we'll talk about that next june so that's it for today and i will see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Homesteading Family

Views: 251,371

Keywords: Homesteading, planting garlic, how to plant garlic, how to grow garlic, growing garlic, hardneck garlic, planting garlic from cloves, planting garlic in fall, planting garlic bulbs, planting garlic seeds, planting garlic from cloves in pots, planting garlic bulbils, planting garlic at home, how to plant garlic from cloves, how to plant garlic bulbs, how to plant garlic at home, how to plant garlic seeds, how to plant garlic from cloves at home, how to grow garlic from cloves

Id: -_s8cWCBIIM

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020