Planting Garlic // Garden Answer

hey guys how's it going I'm getting ready to plant four different varieties of garlic super excited because this is the very first crop I'm putting in my brand new raised beds we just got done Aaron is manning the camera today I was gonna try to vlog this myself but I got into it and I figured out that I needed both of my hands so he's helping me out so let's run out to the garden I'll show you where these are going I'm going to be planting up two raised beds today and this is a three foot by six foot and I think I can fit quite a bit in here the second bed is right behind me let me show ya it's that one right there and the reason why I'm splitting the garlic up and not planting it all on one side on one side or in one spot is because this is the actual entrance of the garden so there's going to be a picket fence right about here with an arbor and I want when you walk through I wanted to feel balanced so if you have garlic coming up on one side that has that nice beautiful texture I want to have that same thing mirrored on the other side before I talk to you about all the varieties I'm going to plant today I just wanted to go over how to plant garlic period because no matter what variety you have you plant it the same way so we're getting close to the middle of October right now typically I like to have my garlic in the ground like mid to late September I'm a little bit late but we've been waiting on this space to be done and it's all looking like it's perfect it's ready to go so the first thing you want to do is you want to look for your heads of garlic best place to get these or at your local garden center you want to look for certified seed garlic and if you buy garlic from the grocery store you're kind of gambling because sometimes they're treated with a sprout inhibitor which makes them not able to produce like they'll germinate they'll come up like this far and then their tops will start to brown and twirl and then they don't grow any further and then sometimes they're not treated and they're fine so you're just kind of running the risk so try to find certified seed garlic once you have it you want to separate the whole head into individual cloves super easy to do just gently pull apart the cloves from the main head there making sure to not to remove the papery skin because that is what keeps the clove able to resist moisture helps them to not rot so look at all of that gun see that one's Knight systems had three six nine ten cloves of garlic on that one head that's really great so a really important thing you want to make sure that whether or not you're planting in a raised bed that has a nice soil like this or if you're planting straight in the ground you want to make sure that you've worked that soil a little bit because like if you've got hard clay it's gonna be hard for these garlic cloves to form a head so if you can work some compost in and kind of get this soil a little bit fluffy and easy for the plant to grow in that's ideal you also want to make sure that it's fast draining they don't like to sit in a lot of water and they like full Sun alright I've got all the clubs spaced out just about roughly six inches apart from one another and the reason why I did it on top of the soil is really kind of just for demonstration purposes only because I wanted you guys to see like I'm such a visual person it helps me to see exactly how to space them so if you are planting these straight in the ground you would probably want to make your trench first so like I said you want to plant them anywhere from two to three four inches deep even so you want to make your trench however long you want your road to be and then you would space these out right at the bottom of the trench instead of on top of the soil like I did here so when you get ready to plant you want to make sure that you plant the pointy side up and it's very easy to tell see right here that's the base where the roots will come out it's always a flatter area and the pointy side goes up so like since mine that soil is so lofty I'm just going to push this about three inches down under the soil kind of like that and it's planted so if you were gardening in a trench you would just lay these all out at the bottom of the trench and then just cover them all over with soil I don't expect I'm gonna be able to push these in the soil like this every year the soil is just so nice this year I love it so you can plant garlic in the spring like if you don't get to it and it's springtime and you want to still plant garlic you still can the benefit of planting it in the fall is that even in the winter time there's still root activity going on so especially if you can get it planted a little earlier in the fall they may even poke up through the ground if it snows on them they're totally fine they're really tough but they typically will form bigger heads if you plant in the fall as opposed to the spring we got this bed all planted this one is ready to go and now I'm going to move over to the other bed and get the rest of it planted before I plant this bed I want to show you all the four varieties I'm growing because I don't have a lot of some of these and I want to show them to you before they're underneath the soil so the whole first bed I planted is this variety here this is called Italian I'm you can see the head right here really nice nice shaped head Italian is actually my very favorite garlic that I've ever grown of course I haven't grown a whole bunch of different varieties so maybe there's something else out there that I would think was my favorite but I think this has a really good flavor it's really it's a strong flavor it's a really classic garlic flavor that kind of builds I like to do a lot of Thai cooking and it's my favorite one for that it is a hard neck and as far as harden it goes all explain the difference in a minute between hard neck and soft neck garlic's heart necks typically don't store it very well but Italian does it lasts all the way through the winter in fact I'm usually using on it still when I'm ready to plant the next year's crop so it usually lasts if you've got a really cool place up to like maybe 9 to 12 months and they're very easy to peel the cloves are and I am really appreciative of that I know don't know about you guys but if you have come across garlic that the papery skin is super hard to get off the cloves it can be a huge pain so Italian is a really good beginner garlic I think because it's really easy so the second variety I have here and I'm not sure how to pronounce this but this is called red touch red toc-toc H this is the only soft neck garlic I'm growing out of the whole bunch and the reason why I am growing one is because they typically have a longer shelf life so they're better in storage so I'd wanted to have at least one variety that would last a really long time it's also very pretty I mean you can see the beautiful coloring the skin they're usually these ones produced about eight cloves per head and they've got a really nice kind of spicy flavor then we've got German red which I don't have very much of I've grown this one several times and I really like the flavour you can see how nice and big these cloves are I love that they're very easy to peel as well and I think that that's a huge benefit and then we have chesnic which look at this look at how pretty that garlic is like just for that alone I like to grow it so this one is probably your best out of these four anyway your best all-around garlic because you can use it for anything it's got a real kind of it's a strong garlic but when you bake it it turns really sweet so not only do you have like just the garlic flavor you actually have a real sweetness to it so it's really really great use that way I even read somewhere that people said that this variety is the best tonight garlic ice cream which i think is gross but to each their own so in this bed here I'm going to be planting all three of these varieties I'm just going to kind of split it up probably planting more of the Tezz necks and their other two varieties here oh you knew I almost forgot I wanted to explain the difference between a hardneck garlic and a soft neck garlic because if you have done any research about garlic you probably have seen those terms come up so the difference is hardneck garlic like these three varieties here they form a really hard long flower stem that comes right up the central part of the bulb so they'll come up and it's called a scape and they'll form another bulb at the top of the scape so I mean they might be this tall and then they'll be what appears to be another small head of garlic they produce little bulbs up there once that scape is mature you can actually harvest the bulbs off those and plant them but it usually takes two or more seasons form to actually form a nice head of garlic hardneck are typically better for colder growing zones as well so if you live in a really tough winter climate you want to look for hard necks they don't store quite as good as a soft neck but I find if you you know have the right storage conditions if you have a cool basement or a root cellar or something like that you really I don't notice a huge difference between my soft neck and hard neck in terms of storage and last thing about hardneck is that they typically form their clothes in a single layer so they'll have the stem in the middle and then all of their clothes will come off apart from that stem right there and then south net garlic they and I don't have a full head here I didn't even think about it when I was pulling this apart but I'll try to find a picture of a head of soft neck but they form instead of a single layer of clothes they'll have multiple layers so they'll have a layer here another layer on the outside they're also called like artichoke garlic because they kind of layer like that they typically store better they're usually better for a milder climate but I find I grow in a zone five so I can get down to negative 20 ish here my soft neck tends to do well in our growing zone so you know but if you live in a milder area the soft neck might be best and it's the best for braiding so if you like to look if you've ever seen the braided garlic or like garlic wreaths typically you are using as well not typically you are using a soft neck because it's not hard I mean you can't braid this there's no braiding that when you have a head of soft neck it's really flexible and you can braid it up and it's really really pretty with hard neck they typically form like eight to ten good-sized cloves with soft neck they can even produce up to 40 per head I mean they can be quite large but that's mainly because they're not putting any energy into forming a long flower stem and then producing more bulbs at the top so they have a whole lot more energy to send into forming their head down at the base okay so now I'm going to play you you you [Music] you so fertilizing your garlic it's pretty important because they are heavy feeders and the more you fertilize them really the bigger the heads you'll get now I didn't add any fertilizer in today because this is brand new soil it was mixed with really nice compost so there's a lot of nutrients in the soil and I know that if I didn't know that or this soil had been here for quite a long time I would have worked in some starter fertilizer something like this right here this is bio tone starter fertilizer it's really good for root development I would have added that in first before putting my garlic in either working it into the soil or if I were trenching it rather than pushing the cloves down I would have sprinkled it at the bottom of the trench and that would just help kind of stimulate new roots to form and then I will follow up so in the spring I will fertilize and I'll use garden tone which is a really good like vegetable and just general plant fertilizer and I'll probably use that twice so I'll use it maybe early earlier spring and then again late spring and then the garlic that you plant in the fall you typically harvest right around fourth of July that's kind of when we start watching it so you can kind of tell when it needs to be harvested because the tops will start to turn brown and they'll start to die back and that's when you know that it's ready to be harvested and now I'm gonna water them in in this fall I really won't have to do much because I expect we'll probably be getting somewhat of a consistent moisture maybe some rain here and there and then we actually had predictions of snow happening before October is even out and I hope that that is wrong I hope we're not gonna get snow already but fall time watering is just basically by eye so I'll just water it in really well today fully saturate the soil and then when it looks like it's dried out I'll probably come out here finger test it you know stick a couple fingers down in that soil make sure that I'm not watering it if it still has moisture if it's dried out you know a couple and just below the surface then I'll reread it down so it's just kind of depending on your weather if you have a lot of wind or if you have an extra long dry spell you might have to water more often so like I said the garlic this fall might come up it might poke through the soil I might have little cute garlic coming up throughout all of these beds I might not either way it doesn't matter they're super tough if the greens come up it can snow on top of them and then they'll the snow go away in the spring and they'll keep on growing if they don't come up they'll probably just come up in the spring and will be just fine so that is pretty much it I'm gonna water them in now so this ins all nicely watered in you can see in the front of each bed I have an actual spigot we will be hooking these all of the beds up to their own individual soaker hose type drip system but I just didn't want to get all of that set up this winter and have them go through a whole winter I don't not sure what it's gonna be like so I'm just gonna wait for spring for that so when I need to water these this fall I'm just gonna string my hose out and water them that way so that is it that is how I plant garlic I'm so excited for this whole project I'm excited that we actually get to show you from start to finish I mean this whole area from being totally bare to having raised beds to now actually planting something in them it's so much fun I hope you guys enjoyed seeing this and we will see you in the next video bye [Music] you

Channel: undefined

Views: 158,291

Rating: 4.9500341 out of 5

Keywords: Garden, Answer, Laura, Flower, gardening, gardener, beautiful, succulents, diy, grow, green, Proven, Winners, Fall, Winter, summer, spring, plant, planting, growing, plants, succulent, shrubs, shrub, bush, soil, dirt, earth

Id: xnrz7pVJziE

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2017