Growing Garlic At Home

Garlic has many benefits to us, we can add garlic into cooking to enhance the taste and provide flavor or use garlic as ingredient in traditional medication or even for warding off vampires. In gardening, garlic provides a beautiful addition to your home garden and companion planting of garlic with other plants will repel pest. Growing garlic at home is easy as long as you grow garlic varieties that suited to your climate / weather. So here are some tips on growing garlic at home successfully.

Tips on Growing Garlic At Home

Garlic Types to Grow At Home

You need do experiment with types and varieties to know which garlic variety can grow best at your home garden. Each types and varieties reacts differently to weather and rainfall patterns.

1. Elephant garlic type is hardy to Zone 5 if given deep winter mulch. It produces a mild-flavored bulb comprised of 4 to 6 big cloves.

2. Softneck garlic types including artichoke, creole and many Asian varieties, grow best where winters are mild and tolerate cold to Zone 5. Most varieties do not produce scapes or edible curled flower stalks. They are great for braiding.

3. Hardneck garlic types including purple stripe, porcelain and rocambole, adapt to cold winter climates and they produce delicious curled scapes in early summer.

When to Plant Garlic?

For growing garlic at home successfully, you need to know when to plant it?

Fall is the best time for planting garlic since it produces bigger and better bulbs. You can plant garlic cloves in well-drained beds after the first frost has passed and the soil is cool or in late winter as soon as the soil thaws.

How to Plant Garlic At Home?

Here are step by step growing garlic at home:

Growing Garlic From Cloves

1. Soil Preparation Before Growing Garlic

Before growing garlic at home, you need to prepare your soil garden.

Garlic may tolerate some shade but it grow best under full sun. Garlic also grow best in well-drained, loamy, rich soil that contains lots of organic matter with pH between 6.5 and 7.0. Growing garlic in raised beds are ideal, except your home garden in very dry regions.

2. Planting Garlic

As mentioned above, fall is the best time for planting garlic. Growing garlic from clove is easy. Each clove will produce a new bulb, and generally, the largest cloves will produce the biggest bulbs.

Planting garlic tips: to protect the cloves from fungal diseases and to get the cloves off to a strong start, soak them in a jar of baking soda and liquid seaweed solution (a heaping tablespoon of baking soda and a tablespoon of liquid seaweed) for a few hours before planting garlic.

3. Spacing

• Place cloves in a furrow or hole with the flat or root-end down or pointed-end up, leave each tip 2 inches beneath the soil.
• Place the cloves about 6-8 inches apart.
• Cover the top the soil with about 6 inches of mulch, such as dried grass clipping or straw mixed with leaves.

Depend on your climate and the variety you’ve planted, in about 4-8 weeks after planting garlic, you'll see shoots start growing right through the mulch. They stop growing during winter then start again in spring season.

Planting garlic tips: mulch will conserves moisture and suppresses weeds which are not good for garlic so just leave the mulch in place into spring.

4. Watering

During spring growth, garlic needs about an inch of water each week. Stop watering when the leaves begin to yellow or after June 1 in order to let the bulbs firm up.

5. Scape Sacrifice

As by mid-June your garlic will begin sprouting flower. The savory stalks / scapes should be removed to encourage larger and more efficient bulb growth.

Planting garlic tips: you may add the scapes to the compost pile or try incorporating them into a delicious scape dip, scape pesto, or scape soup.

6. Fertilizing

You may start foliar-feeding your garlic every 2 weeks after leaf growth begins in spring until the bulbs begin to form or in March and continue until around May 15. You may use fertilizer which is available at the garden center or a mixture of 1 tablespoon fish emulsion and 1 tablespoon liquid seaweed in a gallon of water.

7. Harvesting Hints

It is harvest time when half to three-quarters of the leaves turn yellow-brown. Depend on the variety and your climate, it harvest typically in late June or early July. You need to be careful when digging up each bulb. Remember, do not pull or you may break the stalk from the bulb that can cause it to rot. Once the garlic is harvested, get it out of the sun as soon as possible.

Tie the garlic together in bundles of 6 to 10 bulbs and hang them to cure for about 4-6 weeks in a dry, shaded, and preferably drafty area. You may label them if you've grown more than one variety.

When your garlic is thoroughly dry, just trim the roots but taking care not to knock off the outer skin. You may store them in recycles mesh onion bags or other containers. Don’t forget to cut off the stalks about 1½ inches above the bulb.

Growing garlic at home is easy right? Good luck …

Read also : Tips to Grow Indoor Herbs Healthy and Productive

photo credit: growthis.com