Garlic should be planted after the first good frost. I feel like I've been waiting forever for frost this year, but we finally got some close to Halloween.
This year, instead of gambling with grocery store California grown garlic, I was smart and purchased some heads from the farmer's market. I got them for 6 heads for $5. Try to beat that price in a seed catalogue! I bought 3 heads of Spanish Roja and 3 heads of Wolfmoon. I'm excited about growing garlic that is actually supposed to be grown in Michigan. In addition, these two types will produce garlic scapes (which is a nice harvest in unto itself). My California stuff doesn't produce scapes.
I weeded what was my zucchini bed this past summer, added a random bag of manure I had laying around, and forked everything together to get ready for my garlic planting.
The heads of garlic were broken down into individual cloves. In addition to the Wolfmoon and Spanish Roja, I also planted about 10 cloves of the California-origin stuff I grew this summer and 3 cloves of "Bob" (which I got from a professor in my department who got it from his neighbor Bob). In total I had about 75 cloves to plant.
I laid out the cloves in a 4" by 4" grid (I just eye-balled it). Then I used a trowel to cut a slit about 3 to 4" deep and dropped each clove in (stubby root-side down). Then I smoothed over the surface and covered the whole bed in chopped leaf mulch.
If these behave anything like the garlic I've grown in the last two years, they will start poking shoots out of the ground in a few weeks before winter really hits hard.
P.S. This post was shared on The Homestead Barn Hop.
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