Garlic Planting 2024
Garlic is the first crop we’re planting for our 2025 season and will be one of the very first crops to pop up in bright green rows early next spring. We’ll walk you through why we plant garlic in the fall, how we plant it, and why we’re excited to continue to offer garlic as part of our CSA and farmers market offerings.
Garlic emerging from it’s mulch in mid-April.
So why do we plant garlic in the fall?
Planting garlic in the fall gives us a number of benefits. First, and most importantly, it improves the average size of the garlic bulbs by around 30%. We frequently get comments about how large our garlic is and planting garlic in the fall is one reason for the large bulbs. Second, it’s nice to check something off our planting list ahead of time. The spring is an extremely busy time of year for us and the fluctuations in the weather can have a huge impact on our farm and the ability to plant things on schedule. Having garlic planted going into the season helps reduce that workload and reduce the risk that we might not get a garlic crop. Finally, we’re less busy in the second half of October which allows us to get this job done without worrying about what other jobs need to be done on the farm.
Garlic cloves ready to plant.
How we plant garlic.
Prep The Soil We prep the soil by preceding the garlic with a cover crop. About a month before we want to plant prepare the soil by spreading fertilizer and then incorporating the fertilizer with our tiller. The tiller has several important functions in that it incorporated the fertilizer into the soil, chops up and incorporates residue from cover crops, and leaves the soil light and airy so that we can plant the cloves easily.
Mark Our Rows We use a “dibbler” attachment for our wheel hoe to mark both where the rows of garlic should be and where each individual clove should be.
Plant! It’s a slow process but we plant each clove of garlic individually. This is because the orientation of the clove is important. The root side of the clove must go down for optimal growth.
Mulch! Before deep winter sets in we apply a layer of mulch to our garlic. We typically use straw or corn stover to apply around 4-6” of mulch. Mulching our garlic helps protect the garlic from extreme temperature swings and acts as a weed barrier.
These straw bales will be evenly spread in a 4-6” layer to mulch our garlic.
Why we’re excited about garlic!
Garlic is an important crop for our small scale farmers market and CSA farm. Not only is garlic absolutely delicious in so many applications it’s also really good for you. Don’t take our word for it, check out this blog post from Cleveland Clinic regarding the health benefits of garlic. Garlic can help with everything from helping to prevent some forms of cancer to anti-inflammatory to managing blood pressure.
We do believe that healthy soil grows healthy food that when consumed makes for healthy people.