Plant Garlic – Fall

Garlic is one of my favorite vegetables to grow in my garden each season. I plant between 200-250 bulbs every fall and harvest them in July. My garlic stores in my basement for the whole year so I never buy garlic from the grocery store and haven’t for many years.

In northern climates, the time to plant your garlic is sometime during the next month. I like to wait until I get a hard frost in my garden so I can clean out some beds for my garlic planting. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll plant my garlic during the last weekend in October.

To get you excited about growing garlic I’m sharing the reasons why I love it so much…and think you should too!

It’s super low maintenance. Once you plant and mulch your garlic there’s very little to do until the harvest the following summer. Just keep it weeded (which is easy to do with mulch) and watered if it gets dry.

It survives the winter. Where I live in WI we can get lows down to -40 degrees F in winter. (I know, I ask myself why I live here every January and February!) There aren’t a whole lot of vegetables that can take that brutal weather. But, garlic survives and thrives.

No pests and diseases. In my garden, garlic has always been pest and disease free. There are a few that exist, but they’re not very common in the home garden.

It doesn’t take up much space. You can plant garlic 6” apart on all sides. That means you can fit a lot of garlic in a garden bed. My 250 cloves took up two garden beds this season. Not a bad payback for so little space!

It stores for a long time. If you grow the right types you can store your garlic fresh in your basement or other cool area for up to a year. It’s so fun to use your own garlic in the kitchen all winter long!

It’s fun! Anything that’s easy to grow and requires little work from me is a fun vegetable to grow in my book. Garlic pokes up through the mulch soon after the ground thaws and adds a little greenery to the early season garden, some types produce a crazy looking scape in late spring, and hauling in a load of garlic in the mid-summer kicks of the harvest season with a bang.