Planting Garlic

We love to flavor our food with garlic as it makes everything taste better.  Garlic also has some strong healthy properties.  We've been successful growing it in the past, but have had problems curing it after harvest.  We've usually harvested it during the June - July time frame and it is so hot and humid at that time. When we pull the garlic and start drying it, it doesn't dry properly and begins to rot.

This year I tried using a fan to dry them and was able to get more dry than the previous year, but I still lost a good many.  This year I'm attacking it a little differently in that I'm planting early.  The range for planting garlic in Louisiana is from October 1 - November 30.  I'm actually planting on September 29th.  We grow softneck garlic, which is supposed to do better in the South.  Tricia picked up 3/4 of a pound of garlic at the feed store and that ended up being eight heads.  Although they weren't labeled, I think these are known as Silverskin Garlic.

Eight heads of garlic

The first thing you do is pull away the outer skin of the garlic.  If you just grip the head and twist, the papery covering comes right off.

Removing the outer covering

Then I break apart and separate the cloves.  Each one will make it's own garlic plant and therefore its own head of garlic.  I counted and after separating, the 8 heads of garlic yielded 119 cloves, averaging almost 15 cloves per head.

119 cloves of garlic

By this point it was getting dark, so I put them back in the bag for planting tomorrow.  It was very tempting to use this for eating, but I've learned, "Don't eat your Seed!"

In the Bag

So when I got home in the afternoon, I took care of my chores and then worked up the very top of a wide bed that had squash planted on it this past Spring.  Garlic are supposed to be planted 4 - 6 inches apart and 1 inch deep, so I took a stick and poked holes in the worked up dirt using those spacing and depth guidelines.  I then placed 1 clove in each hole - POINTY-SIDE facing UP.  You can see the tips of the garlic cloves in each hole.

Planting the garlic

I then filled in the holes with some organic soil, just to give them a little boost.  If you notice the bright green leaves framing the photograph, those are leaves from some of the yellow squash plants from the Spring garden that are amazingly still hanging in there.  I just didn't have the heart to pull them up.  I'll just plant garlic around them and put some lettuce, turnips, or radishes in their place when they finally finish up.

Holes filled with rich topsoil

Here is the garlic that is planted on the other side of the squash.  There are actually three different 'patches' of garlic planted on this one row, separated by two squash plants.  

Freshly planted garlic

I made a row marker and noted the planting date.  According to LSU AgCenter Vegetable Planting Guide, garlic take 210 days to harvest, which puts the garlic harvest date at April 27, 2014.  If that holds true, we'll harvest before it is too hot and humid and will be able to dry and store 100 + heads of garlic.

Garlic in the ground!

Once these barely start poking up through the soil, I'll apply a thin layer of mulch to discourage weed growth as weeds compete with garlic for soil nutrients.  Now that the garlic is planted, I'll get busy with the different varieties of lettuce that I need to plant.