I planted garlic this past weekend. You plant garlic in the fall and get a mid to late-summer harvest. It was recommended to have the garlic in the ground 2-4 weeks before the ground freezes. It’s hard to predict actual ground-freezing date, but this is probably a good time. I planted last year on October 11, this year it was October 7th, so we are close. This fall has been really cold as well so I’m thinking we may get freezing earlier than we’ve seen the last couple of years. I planted four varieties – two porcelain garlics (Music and German White), an artichoke variety and a purple stripe variety. The pictures below will show you my planting process:
Here are the heads of the new garlic I ordered from Filaree Farm – two different Porcelain varieties. They get 4-6 cloves per head. I got 6 from one of these and 5 from the other.Here are the cloves – these are monsters! They are not elephant garlic, just a large non-elephant strain.Here are the cloves I planted from my old varieties (from my garlic that grew this year) – the white are an artichoke garlic, and the purple are a purple stripe variety. I ordered a “starter kit” a couple of years ago from Filaree Farm, and they sent these. (They pick the best ones for your area). Both of these strains are very good. I replanted after the first year so these came from that first re-planting. I saved the largest heads for planting and these are the bigger cloves from those.Here they are together – you can see the huge difference in cloves sizes, and my old ones aren’t small! I’m excited to try the porcelain garlic but I wanted to make sure these all get planted, so I will have to wait till they grow to try them.Here is the bed prepped. It only took me 10 minutes to prep because I am re-using my double-dug raised beds! I was hoping that re-digging them to replant would go quickly, and it did. (Check out my earlier summer posts if you are curious about what I did). This bed did have cucumbers this year, but now it has garlic. I prepped it here by shoveling out any weeds, and then using a pitch fork to turn the soil, throwing a little more compost in and turning one more time.Here are the rows of garlic. The bed is like 3×4 feet. I have two rows on the left of the porcelain, one row in the middle of purple stripe, and two rows of the artichoke on the right.Here I’ve put a thick pile of straw over the top to mulch it. I wanted to give it 4-6 inches of cover.Here it is again in relation to the garden.Here is a grape vine I planted today. It’s been outside waiting to go in the garden for awhile and I finally figured out where I wanted it. I didn’t want to bring it in for winter, so I figured I would plant it now – it got some mulch as well to help protect it – hopefully it will be ok.
If you want to check out Filaree Farm’s site, you can find them at http://www.filareefarm.com – I’m sure other places have good garlic too, but I’ve been really happy with this company. They sell heirloom organic garlic, shallots, asparagus, and other things. They have lots of different varieties of garlic and a lot of useful information on how to grow them.
I planted the 11 cloves I got of the porcelain, 14 of the artichoke, and 8 purple stripe – so hopefully next year we will have 33 heads of garlic. I love garlic and cook with it all the time – I’m excited to see how these grow!
You can even plant grocery store garlic, but it may work better if you use organic (conventional garlic may be treated to not sprout). I used store bought garlic a few years ago and it worked well.
My tiny u.p. farm 
Thanks for the garlic planting information. I’ve always wanted to plant some, may be I’ll try this year…
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You can even plant grocery store garlic, but it may work better if you use organic (conventional garlic may be treated to not sprout). I used store bought garlic a few years ago and it worked well.
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