Garlic: A Plant to Love

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Especially in cold areas, garlic benefits greatly from a good layer of mulch – about 2 inches of weed-free straw or pine needles is an excellent idea before snow flies. We think this also helps prevent certain growing problems and consider mulching more important than fertilization.

In the spring, garlic starts peeking its sharp shoots above the soil line around the time the first crocus blooms. As it just gets growing, you can give it a dose of fertilizer – but don’t overfertilize, and don’t fertilize late in the season closer to harvest. It’s good to remember, as it gets on toward late spring, that you want your garlic to stop putting too much energy into making green leaf – and instead push its energy into making a fat bulb.

Water deeply about once a week, unless your early-summer temperatures go over about 95, in which case, you might water more often. If you are growing a stiffneck variety, you will start to see the garlic sending up a reproductive stalk – in most North American climates that happens in early June. On garlic, we call this a “scape.” Unless you have some desire to see the scape – actually a stiff-necked stalk that forms little bulbils on the end – snip this growing stalk off near where it comes out of the leaf (use it in salads). The plant will then put its energy into the bulb, rather than above-ground reproduction.

Garlic starts to bulb out around the time this scape appears. From here, it all happens fast. Within weeks, what was only a sliver of root and stalk in mid-May – something like a scallion – bulges out and makes a nice fat bulb (we hope).

Close to harvest

Toward mid-June, you will notice some of the outer leaves of the garlic plant beginning to die back. The official rules of garlic growing say to dig the garlic when one half of the leaves have died.

But all growing instructions are theoretical and subject to whims of weather and the mood of the soil. In our cool summers, the leaves never really do die back to that extent, so we guess harvest by digging up a bulb here and there and just looking at it.

“Does it look ready?” my husband asks me.

“No, not really,” I say. “Let’s give it another week.”

“Looks ready to me,” he says. So we start digging. Highly scientific, you see.

Still, as a rule of thumb, in most North American climates, garlic is ready to harvest the last week of June to the first week of July. But the harvest is not an exact science, and readiness will be determined by the variety (Colorado Purple is our earliest; Locati is our latest) as well as climate, weather, mulch thickness, moon in Scorpio, political winds, etc. In southern Texas, for instance, you will probably have varieties that mature by late May.

Try this: Just dig up a bulb. If the cloves seem well-formed, it might be time. Ask your significant other what she or he thinks. Either way, it’s not too big of a deal. If you leave the garlic too long, it will start to split apart. It will still taste fine – great, even. But it will look ugly, and it won’t last as long in storage.

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