Garden Update: Garlic

I have never planted garlic in the ground before, I have only tinkered around with planting scraps for the garlic greens (see how-to post here).  I don’t currently have a lot of vegetable garden space, as my landscape is more formal with flowers, bushes, and trees.  This is one of the reasons why I prefer to garden in containers.  Garlic needs about 10 months (that’s right 10 MONTHS!) in soil in order to grow, and this would just not do in containers.  After much debate, I decided that I would try to find a small place in my landscape that I could plant some garlic! 

I found a small space in my backyard between some Sedum and a Peony that wouldn’t be completely upset by filling it with some garlic and got started!    

The process started in September.  I bought garlic cloves from two grocery stores, one clove was a hard neck variety and one was from a soft neck variety.  I separated the cloves, each of these will be planted like a seed, in total I had about 30.  At this point, I amended my soil with some fresh compost and  made three channels/rows to set the clove.  After each clove was placed a few inches from each other, I covered them with soil and watered them in really well and made sure the soil was kept moist every couple of weeks.

The garlic had sprouted significantly by November due to the warm weather.  I was a bit worried about the 6 to 8 inches of green that had already grown, so I decided to cover the area with some extra straw I had on hand just to cover them a bit during the first frosts.  

As you can see in this picture that I took just a few weeks ago (almost halfway for the garlic’s growing season), they are doing just fine above ground.  I can’t wait to see how they are doing below ground. 

I’m interested to see how they look in my landscape through-out the spring/ early summer months (harvest should be sometime in late June!)  As a trial, if these garlic plants don’t look “weird” in my landscape, I might add more vegetables in and around my formal landscape to test out the soil vs container gardening later in the year.

I’ll keep you all updated on the progress!  Have you ever sacrificed part of your landscape for vegetable plants?  Have you ever grown garlic before?  Please answer in the comments, I’d love to know!