Planting Garlic

                                        We planted garlic!!!                                                                         

 Since we closed on our farm in August there are not too many things you can plant in the fall, so we planted garlic.                                                                                                                                      

We planted our garlic on October 17th and we will be able to harvest it in mid-summer. It's is one of the first things we planted along with a couple of flowers, some fruit trees and a variety of greens.

We planted soft neck garlic and hard neck garlic. We also planted elephant garlic which is actually part of the lily family. Who knew.

If you're wondering soft neck garlic  does not have a stem and instead just has tiny flat cloves of garlic. Around the tiny cloves, it has regular cloves of garlic. It also has soft little stalks like green onions. With soft neck garlic, you can dry and then braid the garlic stalks together and hang them up and just pick of cloves of garlic.

Hard neck garlic has a hard stem and just has cloves around the stem of the garlic. It has a hard stalk that you can't eat or braid but in the spring there are garlic scapes which are garlic blossoms that you can eat.

We planted two different kinds of soft neck garlic Inchelium and California Early. We only planted one variety of hard neck garlic which was German White.

We got our garlic from our favorite local seed company Sow True Seed in Asheville NC.

                                        Planting The Garlic. 

1.First we read about planting garlic and decided to try lots of different things. FYI: If you are not familiar with planting garlic you don't plant the entire head of garlic you actually break the head of garlic into cloves and plant each clove.

The first thing you have to do is dig a trench. Some people think you should dig a four-inch trench and others think you should only dig a one-inch trench so we tried both to see which one worked the best for us.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    
2. The second thing you need to do is place the garlic in the trench root down and the pointed end up. You need to place them about four to six inches apart.

3. After you place the garlic in your trench you need to gently cover up your garlic with soil and softly pat it down.

4. The next thing you need to do is water your garlic. Your garlic has to stay moist for three or four days.

5. Next we put mulch in between our garlic as pathways. We are going to mulch the garlic with hay when it starts to grow.

We hope you enjoyed this blog post and if you have any questions or advice please comment below. Happy Planting.
                                   

Our new Garlic

Planting our Elephant Garlic

A row of planted Elephant Garlic

A planted bed of garlic