Choosing Heads for Fall Garlic Planting

Reader Contribution by Ellen Sandbeck
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Today is going to be a garlic kind of day. Walt and I have been preparing the garlic beds for autumn planting, clearing out the weeds, adding worm compost and worm juice, and I hope to start actually putting cloves into the soil sometime tomorrow. Autumn planting is the only way to grow really large heads around here, and garlic adores a heavy feeding of worm compost and worm juice! 

This year’s garlic heads are dry and slumbering cozily in paper bags in the study, and I have separated out the largest, choicest heads for replanting. After planting only the largest, most robust garlic for the past 11 years, our garlic is quite well adapted to our particular garden, and last year’s almost total crop failure, due to flooding, caused much heartache. I ended up planting what we would normally have been eating, and we ran out of garlic before the new garlic was ready to eat this summer, which was very frustrating. However, because we made sacrifices last year (and dug very deep trenches around all our garlic beds), this year’s crop is spectacular. To paraphrase an old saying: “Never eat your seed garlic.”

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