How To PLANT GARLIC For A PEST FREE GARDEN Next Season

what's going on gardeners it's sunday december 5th and it's a gorgeous spring-like day here on the southeastern coast of north carolina and today i'm going to share with all of you how to plant garlic so you have a pest-free garden next season if you're new to the channel please consider subscribing and hitting the bell to receive new video notifications and check out our amazon storefront and spreadshop in the video description for a list of the gardening products i use and awesome custom designed apparel and other gear your support is greatly appreciated where i live on the southeastern coast of north carolina insect pressure is off the charts in the summertime so if i don't have a good insect pest mitigation plan i'm not going to get any harvests worthwhile on the common annual vegetables that we often grow in our summer garden now oftentimes having an insect management plan means having a pesticide spraying routine and while pesticides are required to some degree to have success where i live i don't necessarily like covering all of my plants in pesticides for a whole host of reasons as you can imagine so over the years i've been experimenting with more age-old methods of pest mitigation and one of those methods is interplanting and what interplanting is is you take a common annual vegetable that is very susceptible to pests like a tomato or a pepper or an eggplant or a potato that has a lot of insect pests and then you plant some kind of other plant next to it that has certain properties that chase away insects and the idea is if you interplant undesirable plants that keep pests away next to the susceptible plants the undesirables will chase things away and you'll have less pests in your garden and you won't have to spray as much over the years i've experimented with a lot of these inter-planting methods and some have worked fairly well some have worked not at all for example planting marigolds in between my tomatoes that was a great idea if what you want to do is attract lots of moths to your garden and have caterpillars all over the place so i'll never do that one again and despite all the trials i've done over the years to date i've only found one truly effective inter-planting method that was fantastic and clearly kept pests away from my susceptible plants and that was interplanting garlic in between my tomatoes and this was fantastic for two reasons number one garlic is very shallow rooted whereas tomatoes are very deep rooted so the roots don't directly compete so you can plant your garlic up high and your tomatoes will root down low and they don't really compete with each other and compete for nutrients so they are good companions just if you want to save a lot of space in your garden and number two something about the garlic i'm guessing the odor really does fantastic at keeping the pests away so well does this work that i have really no pest pressure at all on my tomatoes until i eventually harvest my garlic and at that point like clockwork when i harvest the garlic the pests tend to move in and while some of this might be somewhat coincidental because it just so happens to be that i harvest garlic at the peak of the summer heat and that's when insect pressure tends to be the worst it is plainly clear that it is having an effect because of how it's like flipping a light switch that the pests start moving in as soon as i remove the garlic from my garden so impressed am i with this method that i will probably never not interplant my garlic and tomatoes as long as this method keeps working for me now it's early december so in my climate this is a great time to plant my garlic and the only tricky thing about this method is because you plant your garlic in the fall or in the early winter you really have to plant ahead and that is exactly what i'm going to show you because you need to have a garden plan so this method works out for you i have two different kinds of garlic i'm going to plant in my garden i have a hard neck variety called spanish roja which i've been growing for years and does very well in my climate and i have a new soft neck that i've never tried called italian loacono which i'm really excited to try and we'll see how it does in my climate this year and these have spent the past two months in my refrigerator and if you want to know why i will link to a video above that clearly explains why in my mild winter climate i should refrigerate garlic in order to get bigger bulbs long story short when it comes to growing garlic garlic usually grows better in cooler climates you can grow hard neck garlic all the way down to zone three soft neck garlic grows well generally in zones five to ten and does better in warmer weather but they all like the cool so giving them some cold in the fridge before planting really helps their germination rates and leads to bigger bulbs now i'm not going to get into hardneck versus soft neck in this video and i will link to a complete guide to planting garlic above if you want to see why so if you're new to garlic planting i recommend you watch that video this is going to focus more on pest mitigation efforts and i will show you how i plan out my garden so you know exactly how you can interplant your garden for pest success next year now as i said because i'm effectively planting my garlic five months before i'm going to transplant tomatoes into my garden beds planning is everything and what you see right here is you have garden stakes placed all over the place they represent my indeterminate tomatoes and i have them spaced at exactly two feet apart because that is how i plant my indeterminate tomatoes i give them two feet of spacing and it's important to lay them out so you know exactly where everything is going to go then in the exact mid center i have holes that are two inches deep that i pre-dug that i'm going to put my garlic cloves in and then on top of that i'm going to put another inch of compost and an inch of mulch and that's going to make them about four inches deep so i have represented right here i have 26 different steaks placed so that will give me 26 locations for indeterminate tomatoes so that is how you plan in advance and when it comes to spacing your garlic cloves my beds are 24 inches and i have one two three holes with each bed so that means that the cloves are basically spaced six inches apart and that's exactly what you want you want six inch spacing for the garlic bulbs so they have enough space to head well so first i'm going to start with my hard neck garlic and the first thing that you want to do is you want to separate all of the individual cloves from the bulb and as you can see it's already started sprouting that's because hardneck garlic reacts very quickly to warm temperatures so what you want to do is you want to separate the cloves and it becomes very clear which way is up and which way is down you can see these are the leaves sprouting out so you want to plant that facing up and then the wide part on the bottom is the roots so what i'm going to do is i'm going to separate all of the individual cloves from the head and we only want to keep the nice large cloves for planting because generally speaking the larger the clove the bigger the bulb you will get so these are decent sized cloves right here we want to save these the really small ones like you can like you get inside here these these little tiny ones we generally want to toss them because they're not going to give you very nice heads of garlic or we could plant uh we could place them somewhere else so we also want to throw away any soft or spongy cloves that we come across if it feels soft and mushy they are going to be no good and generally speaking these hard neck garlic varieties at least the spanish roja they don't get the biggest heads so the cloves that i'm finding are going to be generally smaller so i'm going to place the the nice size ones in here and i'm going to save the little ones that we don't expect to turn into much we'll keep them off to the side and plant them somewhere else so now i have this beautiful box of hardneck garlic cloves and i'm going to start to plant them and again we're going to plant them so the pointy part of the clove is sticking up because that's where the leaves come out of and the wide part that is going to form the roots so we are simply going to plant them right in the holes and it's great when they're already starting to sprout because then it becomes clear which way is up makes life a whole lot easier so we're just going to press those into the dirt making sure that they don't sink too far again we want these to be somewhere around three inches deep when all is said and done and that right there is what a properly planted garlic clove looks like so now we're going to plant all the rest of my hardneck garlic cloves throughout the rest of the garden and then once we're done planting the hardness we will separate our softneck garlic cloves in the same way and plant them as well [Music] now that the garlic has been planted we need to fertilize it and garlic has a very long slow growing period over many many months so we want to make sure we feed it with a slow release organic style fertilizer that will take many months to break down and the first thing we want to use is some type of all-purpose fertilizer like a 555 npk ratio this is a 544 npk npk ratio it's close enough whatever you find that's organic and generally all purpose whether it's a 555 a 454 a 356 it doesn't matter just make sure that all np and k are represented and that they're low numbers generally below five and make sure it's organic so it feeds your soil not just the plant itself then on top of that we are going to use bone meal and bone meal is a source of phosphorus it has an npk ratio of 214 zero so it's 14 uh phosphate and 15 actually calcium as well and this is critical for root development and it's really good to dust your planting holes with this bone meal so i'm going to show you how easy it is to fertilize your garlic i'm simply going to dust both of them with a handful of each fertilizer then after i place this fertilizer down we will top everything with compost because that will feed the garlic over a very long slow period as well and again this couldn't be any easier we're just going to take a handful of the organic slow release and we're just going to dress each planting hole by sprinkling it on top then we are going to follow up with a very light dusting of the bone meal and then when that is all done we are just going to backfill each planting hole and lightly tap down the soil just using a very light pressure to make sure that there are no voids anywhere in that soil because if there are voids in that soil your garlic bulbs or your garlic cloves rather may not root [Music] now that all the garlic cloves have been fertilized and backfilled we are going to top dress them with about an inch of a cow manure compost now this is what i'm going to use you can use any other kind of compost and again the purpose of this is to slow feed the garlic bulbs throughout the winter so all i'm going to do is i'm going to place a few handfuls down right on top of the trench or the exact location that i buried the garlic and that is going to be about one inch of compost and then i'm going to simply tamp it down and then i'm going to wait for the garlic bulbs for them to send shoots to send leaves and break the surface and then once the leaves break the surface and get about an inch or two tall then i'm going to come in with a layer of hardwood bark mulch or you can use any other kind of natural mulch like seed free grass clippings or wheat straw that doesn't have any seeds in it or you can use a hardwood bark you can use chopped up leaves anything like that so you can top dress with that once the stalks break the surface and then last but not least for the really small garlic cloves i just dug a shallow two inch deep trench and just pressed them in you can barely see them but they're here i'm going to just lightly backfill them they were fertilized in the same way with a little bit of all-purpose organic fertilizer and some bone meal so we're going to just make that nice and neat and then we're going to spread just a little bit of leftover compost the last few buckets full that i had remaining and more than likely those small cloves are not going to give me very large bulbs however they may turn into good seed garlic for me because those bulbs that will form will probably have a few decent sized cloves that we can then hold on to for next season and use them to rebuild our harvest now that everything's been planted and backfilled and fertilized and topped with compost we're simply going to water everything in we're going to give everything a nice deep watering to keep things moist for a long time and then we will simply await germination and if you live in a mild winter zone like me i'm in zone 8 you can expect to see germination anywhere from one to three weeks usually around the 10 to 14 day mark is when you can expect some germination if you live in a place with cold winters that garlic can sit underground and very slowly root before it comes up to the surface for months so just periodically check on things make sure you keep the area moist but not saturated because you don't want the garlic cloves to rot and just keep in mind that during the winter generally the precipitation rate exceeds the evaporation rate which means it rains more than the sun dries out the soil so in many cases you won't have to water much just keep an eye on it and make sure that if you're in a drought situation you don't let the ground completely dry out on you if you're interested in planting garlic like this as a means of pest control but you think oh man it's way too late in the season i can't find any place that's selling seed garlic don't worry have no fear simply go to the grocery store and buy yourself a few cloves of garlic off the grocery store shelves they will plant and sprout just fine my one bit of advice that i would give you is i recommend you try and find organic garlic just to make sure that they're not sprayed with anything that would inhibit sprouting for a longer shelf life if you get organic garlic that means it hasn't been sprayed with anything so it should rapidly germinate and it'll behave just like seed garlic that you buy from catalogs and that right there is how you can interplant garlic in your garden for amazing pest control properties it's been wonderful for me and i sure hope you found this video helpful so everybody if you did find this video helpful please make sure to hit that like button subscribe to the channel and pound that notification bell so you're notified when we upload more videos like these if you're curious about any of the products that i use in my garden such as the fertilizers i used in this video they are all linked down below in my amazon storefront in the video description also check out the spreadshop link while you're there for custom made merch if you'd like to support the channel thanks again so much for watching and i hope to see all of you again on the next video hey dale hey stinker are you enjoying being king of the castle are you enjoying being king of the castle overlooking your embarrassment of riches look at all these toys isn't it a nice day dale look at today it's 77 degrees in december such a beautiful day buddy such a beautiful day and you are just looking as handsome as ever

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 70,007

Keywords: plant garlic, pest free garden, how to plant garlic, how to grow garlic, planting garlic, growing garlic, growing garlic bulbs, planting garlic bulbs, interplanting garlic, garlic pest control, garlic insect repellent, pest control, natural pest control, grow garlic, garlic growing, seed garlic, planting fall garlic, fall garlic, garlic, garlic bulbs, how to, garden, gardening, gardening tips, gardening tips and tricks, organic gardening, millennial gardener

Id: Kjnfx9pC5yY

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 20 2021