Garlic growing requires a certain type of patience (something that most gardener lack). When air begins to turn crisp, you dig a hole in the earth, place a clove inside and cover it up. Then you water it, and forget about it till thaw time. That makes you look negligent if you don’t understand the process. But it is done on purpose. Without necessary cold period (which fools the plant into dividing itself into individual cloves), you’ll end up with one big bulb, which is delicious but doesn’t taste like garlic; it tastes more like an onion.
The visual guide details the journey, from planting to storage, and illustrates how what goes on underground reflect what happens aboveground.
How to Grow Garlic
But in the beginning: Roots, not leaves. Early and often, you want to get that thing growing good white roots. The soil cannot be too cold or too warm for growth, and winter cannot be severe. Plant too late and the roots will never get going; plant too soon and green tops shoot up and die back. Plant too early and the green tops shoots up, freeze, and die back. This waste the plant’s stored energy. It’s a narrow window of opportunity, and doing it right pays off.
Your best friend here? Mulch. That protects delicate roots from freezing out solid by keeping ground unfrozen under all that thickness of straw or leaves. Still lets enough cold penetrate to do its vernalization thing. The hardneck varieties requires this cold exposure, or else they don’t form proper cloves. They forms just one big lump.
Soon green shoots appears, pushing their way through mulch in spring. Time to feed them some nitrogen. Nitrogen promotes leaf production. Leaf production is important: Each leaf translates into another layer of wrapping on eventual bulb. More leaves = more layers. More layers = longer-lasting storage.
As daylight hours increase, the plant also knows; it responds to a photoperiod trigger known as “daylength,” which signal the start of bulbing. The plant shifts its energy from growing tall to growing wide.
In the case of hardneck garlic, look for a flower stalk to poke up. That’s what we call a scape. Many gardeners let it be. It is an energy suck. By cutting that curling thingy called a scape, you send the plant back to thinking about its bulb again. You’ll have much bigger cloves (a fair trade-off). Then you can use those delicious scapes in stir-fries or pestos.
In the summertime, growth begins to slow down as it reaches its peak. Now it’s time to fill out the clove. To do that, keep it well-watered. Misshapen bulbs result if soil around them gets dry now. Growth may also stop completely here.
Later in growing season, lower foliage will begin browning off, signaling the bulbs’ maturity. It is time to lift them when about half of leaf are brown. If you do it too soon, they will be soft. If you pull them up too late, individual cloves will separate, and the wrappers will tear and crumble.
The final step is curing, which involves letting air circulate around the bulbs in a shaded place for two or even three weeks to firm their skins and seal their necks. And it traps all of that spicy goodness inside for months to come. It is slow going, but the payoff is a pantry stashed with homegrown gold. So much better than any bought-in variety. It goes from one clove to a length of braided string, which is a long way. If you honor the time frame, it could of been totally up to you.