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The Garden Plot for October 05, 2007
3:55 PM - 4:00 PM
[Program Website]
Today's Highlight: “Garlic-Planting Time”
Fall is garlic planting time. Garlic needs an extended period of cold in order for the mother bulb you plant to split into cloves. If you don’t plant in the fall, the bulbs need to be stored in a refrigerator at 40 F for six to eight weeks. But it’s best to plant garlic in the ground by early October, before the ground freezes. Then the bulbs can start setting roots for next year, but not have enough time to send up any leaves. In the spring, fall-planted garlic is ready to take off and starts to grow rapidly once the weather warms. Besides being sensitive to temperature, garlic is day-length sensitive as well. Most varieties need the long days of summer before they will develop nice, large, segmented bulbs. In fact, garlic can double in size during the last month before harvest, after the summer solstice.
Choose your planting stock carefully. The size of the bulb and the clove is an important consideration. In other words, big planting stock usually makes for a big harvest next year. Discard anything that is small, diseased, soft, damaged, or discolored. Crack the bulb into individual cloves. Plant the cloves with the basal (bottom of the bulb) side down and cover them 2-4 inches deep.
Garlic does especially well with mulch. Mulches help to improve winter survival, suppress weeds, and maintain soil moisture. Mulches also keep soils cooler in the summer which results in bigger garlic. Good mulch options for garlic include clean straw, composted wood bark, compost, or alfalfa hay. Garlic is tough enough to push through one to three inches of mulch. Many commercial garlic growers plant into raised beds for ease of digging and good soil drainage. While it needs good drainage, garlic likes to be kept relatively moist. It needs approximately one to two inches of irrigation or rainfall per week, until approximately two weeks before harvest. Garlic needs to dry out before harvest. Garlic likes a loose, high organic matter soil and does best at a soil pH between 6.5 and 7.0.
Garlic falls into two types: hardneck and softneck. The softneck varieties are reported to be a bit less winter-hardy than hardneck varieties. However, several garlic growers in Western Montana say that softneck varieties grow very well here. Montana State University recommends the following softneck varieties: Dixon, Inchelium, and New York White. For hardnecked varieties, they recommend Roja, German Extra-hardy, Purple Italian, and Blue Italian. My favorite commercial garlic growers in Dixon like Rocambole (a hardneck variety) and Dixon (a softneck variety).
David Stern of the Garlic Seed foundation recommends that you buy your garlic seed locally. He recommends buying garlic from local farmers or at farmer’s markets. That way you can choose large, healthy bulbs that you know grew well in our climate. The only caveat to this recommendation is that we have a disease called white rot in Montana. It is sometimes difficult to detect. In later stages of the disease, white rot makes garlic cloves soft. To avoid garlic seed infected with white rot, choose large bulbs without discoloration, soft areas, or whitish, powder-like strands caught in the roots at the base of the bulb. To be safe you can dip bulbs and cloves in a fungicide before planting. The least-toxic option disease-preventative fungicide is sulfur.
For more information on growing garlic contact your local county extension agent.
Helen Atthowe's new short program of gardening tips
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