Planting fall garlic for the first time

Our family uses garlic in our cooking daily! It is a delicious vegetable that has some great health benefits as well. We have grown garlic before in the summer. This will be our first attempt at planting garlic in the fall for a summer harvest.

Preparing the garden for planting garlic

We prepare our garlic bed earlier using the double dig method since our soil is really heavy and full of clay. While preparing the bed we also amended it with compost. The bed was about 2 feet wide and 32 feet long giving us plenty of room for a decent sized crop.

Selecting garlic varieties

There are many types of garlic you can plant in your garden. For our selection, we choose Romanian Red, Paradise Purple, Inchelum Red, Ukrainian, Susan Belafiela, and Music. We were first exposed to these varieties by a farmer in Utah who specialized in growing garlic. We absolutely fell in love with the unique flavor profiles that these varieties offer.

Putting the garlic to bed

Garlic should be planted with a spacing of about 6 inches and at a depth of 3 inches. We decided to use a hexagonal planting pattern to optimize the space. Especially since our measurement tool was a hand, not a ruler. Consequently, our garlic is slightly more spread out than the minimum spacing, which may actually be a good thing. They also do not have exactly even spacing or appear to be in very straight rows, oh well! In total, we ended up with over 100 garlic bulbs planted!

Once the garlic was in the ground we covered the bread with a healthy layer of old hay. The hay will protect the garlic from the worst of the winter weather, help prevent the ground from drying out, and suppress weed growth. Now, all we have to do is wait till summer to see how they do!