Fall Garlic Planting

Time to Plan for Fall Garlic Planting!

Garlic is a fun and easy crop for Maine gardeners to grow! With a little planning you can easily grow all the garlic your family will eat for an entire year, with extra left over for gifting, or seed saving for planting next year.

When should I plant?

With proper fall planting your green garlic shoots will literally jump out of the ground in the early spring soon after the snow melts and the sun warms the soil.

Hard-neck varieties are the most common type of garlic grown in Maine. These varieties do extremely well in our cold northern climate, but require a period of winter dormancy (vernalization) to grow to a large size. The cloves start to grow underground in the late fall, go dormant in the winter, and finish growing to full size the following spring and summer. Maine garlic is typically planted in late October and harvested in late July or very early August of the following year.

The goal when selecting your planting date is to have your garlic roots start growing below ground in the fall, but not to have garlic shoots emerge above ground before winter dormancy.

Plan to plant about six weeks before the top inch of your garden soil historically begins to freeze at night. This is the time in mid-fall when you are starting to get mild overnight frosts, but the soil still remains moist and friable during the day. At Earth Dharma Farm, located in Hardiness Zone 5a in interior-central Maine, we use October 21 as our target planting date. For warmer Zone 5b (i.e., Waterville/Augusta/Lewiston) you can move your planting window forward to the end of October (think Halloween), and in coastal and southern Maine Zone 6 you can probably safely plant into the first week of November.

If we are having an unusually warm stretch of fall weather, we delay planting for a week or so. Remember, we don’t want our garlic to emerge before winter!

When can I buy my seed garlic?

Local Maine seed garlic is harvested in late July or early August. and is ready for sale after about three to four weeks of curing. This year Earth Dharma Farm will have 18 varieties of MOFGA certified organic seed garlic for sale at Longfellow’s Greenhouses, available the first week of September.

How much garlic should I buy and plant?

First, decide how many garlic bulbs you would like to harvest for next year. Do you want to harvest just a few bulbs of garlic for fresh cooking, or an entire year’s supply? Do you want to give garlic as a gift over the holidays? Do you want to save your own seed garlic?

After you estimate how many bulbs you want to harvest next year, calculate how many cloves to plant this fall. Each clove of garlic planted will yield one bulb harvested.

The formula to calculate how many seed garlic bulbs to buy this fall is to divide the number of bulbs desired for next years harvest by the average cloves per bulb of seed garlic you are planting this year. Seed garlic growers should publish the average cloves per bulbs for each of the varieties they sell. If the average is unknown, use an average of 4-6 cloves per bulb for porcelain varieties and 6-9 cloves per bulb for purple-stripe and rocambole varieties.

If you want to save your own garlic seed for replanting next year, buy an little extra for planting this year and plan on using about 20-25% of next years harvest for replanting.

 And don’t forget to plant extra to give away as gifts!

Choosing a fall planting location.

Choose a spot in your garden with full sun and rich soil with plenty of organic matter. To control disease try to use a minimum three year rotation from where you previously planted garlic or other alliums. Garlic does not like wet feet, so make sure the soil is well drained to quickly shed the spring snow melt. Raised beds work very well for garlic, providing good soil drainage. When you have your location selected we recommend sending a soil sample to the University of Maine Soil Lab in August or early September to fine tune your soil pH and fertility.

Spacing

Research shows garlic does very well with fairly close in-row spacing. We recommend 6 inches on-center between each clove within each row. For between-row spacing we recommend 8-12” spacing.

Final Bed preparation and cracking seed garlic

We like to finish our final garlic bed preparation and tillage by October 1st. Adjust the soil ph per your soil test and add any recommended fertilizers and compost if desired. We cover our prepared bed with a plastic tarp to keep out any late season weeds and prevent erosion. Our last step is to crack our seed garlic into cloves a day or two before planting.

Coming later in August we will post a brief article on garlic varieties and selecting healthy seed garlic, and in September an article on how we plant and mulch garlic at Earth Dharma Farm.

In the meantime, please feel free to call us with any specific garlic questions!

Happy Garlic Growing!

 

Article written and provided for Longfellow’s by,

David McDaniel and Heather Selin

Earth Dharma Farm – MOFGA Certified Organic

Jackson, ME