Something exciting that’s happening at Lynette’s urban farm is we are starting to plant some of our fall crops. One of the first crops that we plant for the fall is garlic, it’s a super easy crop to plant, take care of, and harvest. We are going to show you how we do it here and how easy it is to implement in your own garden.
These are garlic cloves that we harvested last year, so not too long ago, we were drying these and we cured them and now they are ready to be eaten, but you can also use them to plant. Whether you have garlic from the past that you grew, or you want to go and just buy garlic from the grocery store, either way, this works.
So what we’re gonna do is just take nice bulbs that have been dried, and we’re just gonna separate it like you would, if you were gonna go eat it and then we’re just gonna peel off the papery portion. It doesn’t have to be perfect we just want a little bit of that extra protective layer off. It’ll just make it a lot easier for the garlic to sprout. So what’s going to happen is we’re gonna plant the garlic like this, and you can see where it was all attached together, where the clove was attached to the bunch. So this is where the roots will come out of. And then this tip a sprout will actually come out of this. So the top part of garlic you see is gonna come from this part. so, we always wanna make sure that we plant them with this base in the soil like that.
So once we have a decent amount peeled, we are gonna plant them. So once you have your bulbs peeled, or at least peeled enough, so that the tip of the bulb is out of the papery shell. What we’re gonna do is plant them. So you wanna make sure that you use nice loose soil, and then we’re just gonna make a trench. And it doesn’t have to be too deep. We just want it to be deep enough for the bulb. Spacing is really easy to picture, you just need to picture how big a bulb of garlic is. So each bulb needs this much space because each one of these will create one of these. So for spacing, I’m just gonna put this, remember with the base down.
This makes garlic a really easy plant to fit into small spaces in your garden, it doesn’t take up a lot of space. The leaves that it produces come straight up so those don’t take up a lot of space or do a lot of shading either. And your bulbs don’t have to be perfect. You can see one like this still perfectly find the plant it’ll still produce. So then once you have them all with tips up, you are just gonna cover them lightly and you don’t wanna bury them too deep. You just want that tip barely under the surface of the soil.
Then I’m gonna use the rest of the garlic, and I’m gonna keep on making rows of garlic. We just wanna make sure that they get water right away. Within a couple weeks, you will start to see little sprouts coming out of your garlic.
Then we wait and eventually when the stalk get about this tall, they’ll start to dry out. They’ll go from green to brown. And that’s when you know that your garlic is ready to harvest, but otherwise garlic doesn’t take a lot of work. It just requires water and some sunlight, and you will have a bountiful harvest the next season.
Garlic is one of our favorite things to grow here on the farm. It’s super easy, really low maintenance and just all around a great plant to have in your garden. Or even in a small pot, you can grow garlic and I hope this helps you grow some garlic of your own and have it for seasons to come.
