How to Plant Garlic

Garlic breaks into two camps and the choice depends on your climate. Softneck garlic is what you see at the grocery store. It has smaller, more numerous cloves, milder flavor, stores up to a year in the pantry, and handles warm climates without any special treatment. Hardneck garlic has fewer but much bigger cloves, more pungent and spicy flavor, stores about six to eight months, and strongly prefers a cold climate.

If you are in USDA zones 3 through 7 (the northern half of the US), default to hardneck. The big, easy-to-peel cloves are worth growing for the kitchen alone, and the cold winters do the work of vernalization for you. If you are in zones 8 through 10, start with softneck because it is forgiving. Hardneck is still possible in warm climates, but it requires the refrigerator trick covered in the next step.

If you live in zone 8 or warmer and want to grow hardneck garlic, you have to fake winter. Hardneck has a built-in requirement for two to three months at 40 to 45 degrees Fahrenheit before it will form a proper bulb. In a cold climate this happens naturally in the ground. In a warm climate the bulbs just sit there and never split.

Put the whole bulbs in a paper bag and stash them in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator for 8 to 10 weeks. Check them once a week and pull out any that go soft or moldy. Do not put them in the freezer - freezing temperatures burst the cells inside the clove and kill the garlic outright. The fridge is cold enough.

Take the cloves out of the fridge a day or two before planting and let them come to room temperature. Plant them right after the vernalization window ends so they keep moving forward into the growth phase instead of stalling.

Garlic wants direct sun and demands drainage. Pick a bed that gets at least six hours of full sun a day. Heavy clay or compacted soil leads to garlic rust, rotted bulbs, and poor sizing - so if your native soil is dense, build a raised bed or amend hard before planting. In very hot climates, a spot with light afternoon shade is acceptable and will actually help during the heat of late spring.

Clear the bed completely before you start prepping. Pull out any leftover summer crops, weeds, and large roots. Garlic hates competition - it puts very little energy into shading out neighbors and any plant nearby will outgrow it. Empty bed means a clean start. Aim to plant garlic in a spot that did not grow onions, leeks, shallots, or garlic the previous year to avoid disease buildup in the soil.

Garlic is a heavy feeder and you almost cannot give it too much compost. Spread two to three inches of finished compost across the surface of the empty bed. Then take a garden fork and work the top 8 to 12 inches of soil, mixing the compost down and breaking up any compaction at the same time.

The fork does two jobs at once. It tills the compost into the root zone so the garlic has nutrients available all winter and spring, and it loosens the soil so the developing bulbs can swell without resistance. Bulbs that grow in tight soil come out small and misshapen. Bulbs that grow in loose, fluffy soil come out round and full-sized.

Pull out any rocks, thick roots, or chunks of old plant material you turn up. Smooth the surface with the back of a rake when you are done so the bed is level for planting.

The rule for timing is simple: get the cloves in the ground a few weeks before the coldest part of your year. That gives the roots time to develop in the still-warm fall soil and the tops time to break dormancy in early spring. Plant too early and the shoots come up in late fall and get hammered by hard freezes. Plant too late and the roots do not develop before the ground freezes.

In USDA zones 3 through 7, that usually means mid-September through mid-November - you want to be done planting two to three weeks before your first hard frost. In warmer zones 8 through 10, the window shifts later to November through early January, because the coldest part of the year arrives later. Look up your zone with your zip code at planthardiness.ars.usda.gov, then pick a date in the back half of fall.

Break each bulb into individual cloves right before planting, not days ahead. Press your thumb against the basal plate at the bottom of the bulb and pop each clove off one at a time. Keep that loose papery skin on each clove - it is a protective layer that helps the clove survive contact with the soil and resist rot.

Look at the cloves as you separate them. Bigger cloves produce bigger bulbs in the harvest, so save the largest and fattest for the bed. The small inner cloves from a softneck head can still be planted, but if you have more cloves than bed space, plant the biggest ones and set the small ones aside. Toss them in a shallow pot indoors and they will sprout up as green garlic - a green-onion-shaped culinary treat with mild garlic flavor.

Discard anything that feels soft, looks brown inside, or is starting to mold. Only plant firm, healthy cloves with intact papery skins.

Take a clove and look at it. One end is pointed (the tip where the original sprout came out) and one end is flat (the basal plate where the roots come out). Push each clove into the soil pointy side up, three to four inches deep, so the tip is one to two inches below the soil surface. Cover with soil and pat firm.

Pointy side up is non-negotiable. If you plant a clove upside down, the sprout still grows toward the surface but it has to loop around the bottom of the clove first, and the resulting bulb is small, twisted, and misshapen. Take a second per clove to check the orientation - it is the single most common rookie mistake.

Space the cloves six inches apart in the row. Rows can go six to eight inches apart, with the wider spacing on beds that have had any disease pressure in past seasons. Tight spacing gives you more garlic per square foot but reduces airflow and increases the chance of fungal problems in wet years.

Once every clove is in, cover the entire bed with about three inches of straw mulch. A light-colored shredded straw reflects heat back into the air instead of letting the soil bake, holds moisture so the cloves do not dry out, insulates the developing roots through hard freezes, and suppresses weeds that would otherwise compete with the new shoots in spring.

Water the bed thoroughly right after mulching to settle everything in. Through winter, garlic mostly takes care of itself - you do not need to water unless you are in a dry climate with no winter rain or snow. Green shoots will push up through the mulch in late winter or early spring depending on your zone. Leave the mulch in place all the way through spring and into summer.

Stop watering about two weeks before harvest, which lands in mid-to-late summer for fall-planted garlic. You will know harvest is coming when the lower leaves yellow and brown while the top three or four leaves are still green. Dig a test bulb, check the clove definition, and pull the rest of the crop when the cloves are clearly separated.