Plant garlic in autumn for a summer harvest
Plant garlic in autumn and it needs almost nothing until summer. Choose good cloves, plant them pointed end up, and keep the bed weeded.
Published
Plant garlic in autumn, and it is one of the least demanding crops on the plot. Each clove you put in the ground grows into a whole bulb by the next summer. Garlic needs a spell of cold weather to split into cloves, which is why autumn planting works so well in a cold climate like ours.
Choose good cloves #
Buy garlic sold for planting, from a seed company or a garden centre, rather than garlic from the shop. Shop garlic may carry disease, and it may be a variety suited to a warmer climate. Pick the biggest, firmest cloves from each bulb, because big cloves grow big bulbs.
How to plant garlic #
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Prepare the bed
Choose a sunny bed that does not get waterlogged. On heavy clay, plant into a raised or no-dig bed.
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Split the bulbs
Split each bulb into cloves just before planting. Keep the papery skin on each clove.
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Plant pointed end up
Push each clove into the soil, pointed end up, so the tip is just below the surface. Space them about a hand's width apart.
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Keep the bed weeded
Garlic hates competition. Weed gently by hand through winter and spring.
Birds sometimes pull new cloves out. Cover the bed with netting for the first few weeks, until roots hold them down.
When to harvest #
Lift the bulbs in summer, when the lower leaves turn yellow. Do not wait until every leaf has died back, or the bulbs start to split apart in the ground. Ease them out with a fork rather than pulling, so the stems do not snap.
Dry them somewhere airy and out of the rain for a few weeks before you store them. I hang mine in bunches from the shed roof. Once the skins are papery and the roots are dry, rub off the soil, trim the roots and keep the bulbs somewhere cool and dry.
Garlic is the crop I recommend most in a first year on an allotment, because it grows while you sleep. When you lift it, sow a winter cover crop on the empty bed. Like tomatoes, you can keep your best cloves to plant again, much as I do when I save tomato seed.
The entry on garlic at Wikipedia has more on its varieties and history.
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The Allotment Letter is written by Margot Ellery on her plot in Sheffield.
About the author
Writer of The Allotment Letter
Experience Has worked the same half-plot allotment in Sheffield for eleven seasons, and volunteers on her site's committee
Margot grows vegetables on a half-sized allotment plot in Sheffield, on heavy clay soil and in a cold, wet spring. She writes The Allotment Letter every Thursday about what she did that week, what went wrong and what she would do again.
