Planting Garlic - Late is Better than Never!

@idyllwild and I just moved into our new off grid rental home a little over a week ago. Last week our first priority was getting unpacked and settling in. Tied for first priority was get the garlic in the ground ASAP!!!

We are already late to the garlic planting game since it's better to do it in the fall before the ground freezes over, especially for hardnecks. Being in the ground all winter allows the garlic cloves to start slowly developing strong root systems throughout the winter.

We're rule breakers so we say, no matter! We're not going to let missing out on a fall planting hold us back from planting this spring. Maybe our garlic won't be as big, or maybe the harvest will come later in the season. Either way it's not enough reason for us to give up on garlic.

A few days into our unpacking I pulled out the garlic and we started popping the cloves!

I have a lot of gratitude for our garlic. It was all gifted to us by two farms that we worked with. Green Waves farm gifted us garlic seconds last year for helping them plant their garlic crops. Green Mantis farm who we work traded for a home to live in also shared their seconds with as well. We had plenty of garlic to eat through the winter and came out with quite a bit more... perfect for planting!

Since it is almost spring, some of the garlic has gotten soft and some cloves have mold growing on them. So we were careful to sort out garlic that was moldy or looked like it wasn't going to make it, as well as some for our own fresh eating.

The interesting thing about sorting garlic at the end of winter is that you can see what keeps the best. This gives me an idea about breeding garlic. I am wary about planting only cloves because you are essentially planting clones of clones of clones every year. The genetics do not have a chance to evolve. I would like to breed my own garlic on a two year breeding cycle. Two years because the first year a clove is bread to go to seed. The second year the seeds are planted to grow cloves. Some cloves are planted immediately that fall and some are saved for eating and some saved for planting seed the next year.

If garlic planted in the late winter/early spring don't produce huge cloves it may still be a useful endeavor because you can grow the best keeping cloves out for seed that year. If it doesn't produce huge heads that year who cares because you are growing it for seed.

In any case I am hoping for decent sized heads!

We are blessed with access to garden with amazing soil. There are some beds with soil that has already been worked previous seasons and a lot of the garden is still in grass. We'll likely be digging up grass and prepping new beds. In either case under the grass and in the existing beds the soil is beautiful. It is clay, but dark rich with organic matter. Very different than the clay I was dealing with in my first and second gardens.

The soil is super wet right now so we don't want to do a lot of digging. We picked one of the bigger beds that wasn't too soggy, weeded it, planted the garlic and walked away.

We found it easiest to lay out the garlic cloves in the spacing that we wanted and then go back over it and plant them.

Once all the garlic was planted we used lawn clippings to mulch the bed.

I will keep you posted on the garlic progress and harvest throughout the year! In the meantime we are doing a bunch of prep work for getting seeds started. I will be sharing that with you shortly!