How to plant garlic

I bought a bag of garlic at TSC (it was on clearance! I couldn't help it!) and the pictures with the instructions seem to imply that I should plant the *whole* thing (head?) instead of breaking it up and planting each clove separately.

I don't get it. I thought you'd plant each clove and each one would turn into an entire head with multiple cloves.

How does this work?

-Wendy

You are correct.

So either the instructions are poorly-worded, or were written by someone who knows nothing about garlic, or are the generic copy they put on all packages of bulbs sold by that company ;P

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

Yes, you pull the cloves apart and plant individually. I usually buy garlic bulbs from the produce aisle of the grocery store and plant those, it's way cheaper than seed garlic. We have mild winters, so I plant mine in the fall and harvest in early summer.

Ariel301 said:

Yes, you pull the cloves apart and plant individually. I usually buy garlic bulbs from the produce aisle of the grocery store and plant those, it's way cheaper than seed garlic. We have mild winters, so I plant mine in the fall and harvest in early summer.

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So true ARIEL , you can save a bundle by separating a garlic clove and planting the cloves. .I am having great success this year with some I planted late fall.

I came >this close< to buying some clearance garlic at Walmart yesterday. But the bulbs they had were all dried up so I figured they wouldn't grow well.

And yes, the directions on these said to plant each clove separately.

AmyRey, can I suggest that in Georgia you try planting a few cloves in early September in a place they can overwinter. I'm north of you and I get much better results with a fall planting. You don't need to do anything special for them to protect them from frost or anything, except maybe your chickens.

You might try just a few to see how it goes. Yiou may join Ariel301 and me in this after trying it.

I haven't been aiming to plant any garlic at all actually, so I would certainly not have any problems waiting for a more opportune time to plant.

They are frost-hardy I gather?

Yes, garlic is hardy. For the most part, if you plant garlic now, you'll get a harvest, but it will be small. Best to plant garlic in October, like a fall planted bulb. Plant individual cloves about two inches deep in nicely enriched soil (I like to use Bulbtone, a bulb fertilizer from Espoma, it's 'almost' organic and seems to give them just the food they need). Once the soil freezes, give the bed a good layer of mulch to keep them in the ground and dormant. Sometimes they'll break dormancy and send up a shoot, don't worry about it, but don't encourage it In the fall they're busy setting a good root system. In the spring they'll sprout in earnest and grow, grow, grow. Each leaf represents a clove. Sometime around the end of July they'll start to brown, once 2/3 of the leaves are brown, I knock the plant over to make the rest of them dry. Then, pull them, set them somewhere to cure for a week or so, out of the sun, and voila, you've got more garlic than you can possibly use!

Reinbeau said:

Yes, garlic is hardy. For the most part, if you plant garlic now, you'll get a harvest, but it will be small. Best to plant garlic in October, like a fall planted bulb. Plant individual cloves about two inches deep in nicely enriched soil (I like to use Bulbtone, a bulb fertilizer from Espoma, it's 'almost' organic and seems to give them just the food they need). Once the soil freezes, give the bed a good layer of mulch to keep them in the ground and dormant. Sometimes they'll break dormancy and send up a shoot, don't worry about it, but don't encourage it In the fall they're busy setting a good root system. In the spring they'll sprout in earnest and grow, grow, grow. Each leaf represents a clove. Sometime around the end of July they'll start to brown, once 2/3 of the leaves are brown, I knock the plant over to make the rest of them dry. Then, pull them, set them somewhere to cure for a week or so, out of the sun, and voila, you've got more garlic than you can possibly use!

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Great information!! I did not know that each leaf represents a clove..always learning something..Thanks.

I planted mine at the end of September last year. A few bulbs from a garlic grower and a bulb from the grocery store. Because of the mild fall we had they started growing quickly. I waited until it started to get colder out and they looked like they had stopped growing and cut back the green tops and covered them with hay that the goats "waste" out of the feeders. They were dormant all winter long and started growing early March really fast and tall. Some now have scapes which I decided to leave on the plant and are turning a little yellow on the ends of the greenery. I will harvest when 2/3 of the greenery turns yellow/brown. I'll let you know how it goes when I harvest them. I plan on using some for pickles and dry storing the hardnecks for the longest storage. I hope I have enough to make a pretty braid to hang in the kitchen. Good luck with yours and let us know how it went.

Edit to add:
BTW, we had to snow "events" and the last one the garlic bed was covered in snow for 10 days. I don't know that this tidbit of information is important, but we did have some "colder" weather this year.