The Great Garlic Mulching of 2024
Pretending I’m thrilled to be itchy! All kidding aside it was a beautiful day to be outside taking care of a crop we love!
Garlic Mulching either marks the beginning of next season or the end of the current season. I’m not sure which. This year, it was the absolute last outdoor field project we’ll do this year. It’s also the capstone to planting garlic which is the first crop we plant with intent to harvest in 2025. Either way, it’s a big project and I’m happy that it’s done. Here’s why and how we mulch our garlic.
Mulching garlic is a way to provide some extra thermal protection to the garlic cloves we planted just a few weeks ago. We all have experienced how climate change is making extremes more extreme and temperature fluctuations seem to roller coaster all over the place these days. Mulch helps insulate the garlic and provides some thermal regulation from the extremes we experience.
We have heard that it’s possible to grow garlic without mulching and it’s something we’ve considered but ultimately have decided that the mulch is too beneficial to not use. For us, the main additional benefits include weed suppression, moisture regulation, and the addition of more organic matter. Weed suppression is kind of a no brainer: - the less weeds our garlic has to compete with the better it grows and the less time we need to spend hand weeding it. Mulch also helps regulate and retain moisture which is particularly important in dry years. The mulch helps keep the moisture in the soil and greatly slows down how fast the soil dries out. Finally, the additional organic matter is beneficial to our soil. The vast multitudes of soil microbes feed on soil organic matter. The more organic matter we can feed them the better as they help improve our soil by adding nutrients, improving water infiltration, and reducing runoff. As we like to say: healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people.
We use either straw mulch from wheat or oats or cornstalk mulch from baled cornstalks for our mulching material. This year it took us about 40 small square bales to cover our garlic plot in about 4” to 6” of mulch. It’s a pretty labor intensive process. The small square bales we use are about 40# each and they are all torn apart and spread by hand. We stage the bales over the garlic plot and then tear them apart and spread them out. It’s slow, itchy, and tedious work but it’s worth it to keep our wonderful garlic tucked in for winter.
Garlic has become a very important crop for us and it’s something our CSA members look forward to every year. Not only is garlic delicious but it’s also very healthy including some evidence that it can help lower cancer risk and has anti-inflammatory properties among many others. Check out this article from the Cleveland Clinic regarding the health benefits of garlic.
Ok! That’s the last blog post on garlic for a little while. We’re excited to continue to offer this pantry staple to our CSA Members, our online store and our farmers market stand!
The finished product!