[Attila the Honey]

I have a bazillion questions about gardening but I will start with garlic.

A friend of the family sent me home Saturday with tons of garlic to plant, so I planted it. Now I looked online and see that it says to plant in the fall. Did I screw up? What happens now?

Also, how do I know when it's ready to be harvested?

 

[CarrieMF]

You can plant in the fall, or in the spring(or anytime really). The rest I don't know about as it's the first time I've grown garlic.lol I was told by a neighbor that it needs sandy soil, but ours is coming up fine. All of her suggestions on gardening don't really work in our garden though & our garden produces alot more & better than hers.

 

[NatureMama3]

they may take longer to mature, but you can still eat them and they're great! they're more like onions than cloves when picked immature, but are DELICIOUS!

 

[emdeecee_sierra]

so glad you started this thread op!

when i harvest the garlic, do i pull it all up at once and store it? or can i leave it in the ground and harvest as-needed?

when I buy garlic from the store it starts to sprout on me in a matter of days; concerned homegrown will do that, too. if I grow my own, is it possible to have a continuous supply?

i envision going out to the garden and pulling up some when I'm about to cook with it throughout the year- is this feasible?

garlic

garlic

garlic

garlic

 

[Attila the Honey]

I can't answer any of your questions sierra, but I thought of another one of my own:

Can I eat the greens? Will that affect the garlic?

I planted onions too, and I don't know anything about those either.

 

[Morganfyre]

Yeah, the best time to plant is fall - about a week or two before Thanksgiving. You're really not going to have anything come up at all unless you get things just right (and what that is I'm not precisely sure!).

The best rule of thumb we've discovered is plant in mid-November, begin watering every other day in March (after freeze is over) and by summer, you should have a great crop going.

As to what you do with it. When the leaves start dying even though you're watering them, that's when you stop watering. Let everything go dry, and then pull all of it up. Don't leave stuff in the ground if you can help it because it will go bad. Harvest all at once. Then lay it out on screens in a shady spot to finish drying out the outer husks. DON'T LET BIRDS GET TO THEM! Very bad juju.

Once it's finished drying, it's good to either use, can, or store in a cool, dark place to plant again in the fall.

 

[NatureMama3]

You can eat the greens (selectively), in fact you're supposed to eat the flower, or the root will stop growing.

Sierra, how do you store your garlic? There are aerated clay jars you can get to store them in that help keep them from sprouting like that.

 

[CarrieMF]

Quote:

Yeah, the best time to plant is fall - about a week or two before Thanksgiving. You're really not going to have anything come up at all unless you get things just right (and what that is I'm not precisely sure!). The best rule of thumb we've discovered is plant in mid-November, begin watering every other day in March (after freeze is over) and by summer, you should have a great crop going.

Mid-Nov the ground is mostly frozen here & the freeze isn't over until May, sometimes June.

Quote:

Sierra, how do you store your garlic? There are aerated clay jars you can get to store them in that help keep them from sprouting like that.

Can you store garlic in a cold storeage room like you can with Onions?

 

[NatureMama3]

yes, as long as it is cool enough (35-40 is what Seed to seed recommends) and humid enough (60% or so).

You can plant garlic between august and november, depending on when your hard-freeze dates are. Seed to Seed (happen to have it handy today

) recommends late august for upper midwest, which is probably closest to your zone.

 

[go4it]

Green garlic is yummy - like green onions, only garlicky! But if you pull it out when it's green, you won't have it when it's mature, of course, so I hope you have a lot...
(makes a lovely gentle garlic soup!)

Last year, I planted commercial garlic cloves in the spring and they basically did NOTHING all summer and fall, sprouted but didn't grow much. This spring, I was happy to see that they were still there, strong and green and growing. One just grew a "scape" today, which I'm told is another good, yummy part of the garlic.

I am trying garlic & onions - very helpful thread bc I'm still a near-total dummy in the garden!

 

[courtenay_e]

Hey, Atilla! Great to see you over here! I know that we get TONS of garlic scapes from our CSA, and they are supposed to give us a bunch of garlic later on, so we must be able to eat both w/o harming the cloves.

I don't know for sure, because though I DO plant garlic, it's mainly to keep the aphids off of my other plants! I also grow yellow and white onions for the same reason. It works great, excpet for this year, it's not so great at keeping the aphids off of the honeysuckle. I've taken to just mashing up a bunch of onions and garlic and burying it at the base of the plants. *sigh* that's only working minimally, as well. They're just BAD this year!...

sorry, thats really another thread, isn't it?

 

[CarrieMF]

Quote:

yes, as long as it is cool enough (35-40 is what Seed to seed recommends) and humid enough (60% or so).

It's cold enough in the winter to keep drinks cold.lol

Quote:

You can plant garlic between august and november, depending on when your hard-freeze dates are. Seed to Seed (happen to have it handy today ) recommends late august for upper midwest, which is probably closest to your zone.

I live on the edge of Saskatchewan, halfway up. Hard freeze is after Cnd Thanksgiving. That weekend is usually when I pull whatevers left in my garden(carrots, potatoes, pumpkin, onions).

I have tonnes of garlic leftover from when I planted & I was going to try some this fall. If it does nothing, it's just a couple of cloves.

Quote:

Green garlic is yummy - like green onions, only garlicky! But if you pull it out when it's green, you won't have it when it's mature, of course, so I hope you have a lot... (makes a lovely gentle garlic soup!)

We've grown garlic chives before. People think we eat too much garlic already, I should make some garlic soup.lol One of dh's friends made a comment to him last summer about dh having eaten garlic because he could smell it on dh. Dh said he hadn't eaten any since the day before.lol

What is a garlic scape?

Quote:

don't know for sure, because though I DO plant garlic, it's mainly to keep the aphids off of my other plants! I also grow yellow and white onions for the same reason. It works great, excpet for this year, it's not so great at keeping the aphids off of the honeysuckle. I've taken to just mashing up a bunch of onions and garlic and burying it at the base of the plants. *sigh* that's only working minimally, as well. They're just BAD this year!...

Have you tried ladybugs? I noticed that they home/garden stores are starting to sell them right now.

 

[Attila the Honey]

Hey C_e!

Ok, so if I just leave this garlic right in the ground and eat only the greens, I will have good garlic NEXT summer, right? Is that how it works?

Or will I have to start all over again in the fall?

 

[nattybo]

Ahhh garlic! my latest passion

It is getting close to the time to harvest garlic here in zone 7...like in the next 7 days. Harvest is done when the plant is 60% green and 40% brown/yellow and when the scape is completely unfurlled (hardnecks). And you harvest by putting a pitchfork in the ground and wiggleing (sp?) it back and forth. Once the dirt has loosened around the bulb, put the fork tines under the bulb and push the bulbs out of the ground. Don't pull the garlic plant out of the dirt like an onion, you will risk breaking off some of the cloves to be lost in the dirt or snapping the neck and affecting the bulbs storage life.

There are basically 2 kinds of garlic: softneck and hardneck. Hardnecks send up a scape (flower stalk) that can be eaten. I don't know about eating the other leaves of the garlic plant...they are looking a little chewy right about now

Softneck garlic generally does not send up a scape...they will scape if there has been a drought and for preservation reasons are striving to survive for the next season by making seed.

Attila the Honey, if you leave the bulbs/cloves in the ground, you run the risk of them being over-watered in the summer-time and rotting away to nothing (this happens to tulips too) or being underwatered and shrivelling away to nothing or being eaten by pest worms (again, tulips too). But they can also be left in the ground and come up fine in the fall. For the rest of the summer though, they will die back (like tulips). Were you given plants or cloves to plant? Do tulips thrive in your area/zone (come back year after year?). If tulips do well, then leave them be, you might loose a few...This is the time of year that they go dorment...so do not be surprised when they turn brown and "die." This is a tough call...I would be tempted to dig them back out and cure them. Its only been since Saturday. Assuming that you were given plants, what is the ratio of green to brown leaves?

The planting and harvesting of garlic is a regional/zonal one. Garlic growers in zones farther south than me have already harvested their crop. But the growers further north of me still have a few weeks to go until harvest time. Same applies to planting...autumn happens at different times for each zone. The time that you plant your grass seed is also the time you plant your garlic (tulips too).
hth,
nattybo

 

[NatureMama3]

(the scape is the flower

looks much like an onion flower)