Planting Garlic In Fall Gardens

If you are wondering how to grow a garlic plant, you are in the right place. Planting garlic in fall gardens is an excellent way to cultivate your own delicious varieties.

Reader Contribution by Jennifer Kongs
Updated on August 17, 2023
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by AdobeStock/alicja neumiler

If you are wondering how to grow a garlic plant, you are in the right place. Planting garlic in fall gardens is an excellent way to cultivate your own delicious varieties.

The Small Home, Big Decisions series follows Jennifer and her husband, Tyler, as they build a self-reliant homestead on a piece of country property in northeastern Kansas. The series will delve into questions that arise during their building process and the decisions they make along the way. The posts are a work in progress, written as their home-building adventure unfolds.

Tyler and I have kept a garden on a nice plot gifted to us by a farmer that I used to work for, and the plot was about 2 miles from our old house on nice river bottom soil. Now that we’ve moved outside of town and farther from that plot, we’ve decided to give that land back to the farmer and his son, and we’re going to do what we can on our own property. We wrote in the last post about starting our garden by raising American Guinea Hogs on the area that will be planted and cultivated next season. The only piece that was missing: Where do we plant our garlic before winter?

Garlic is best planted in fall — we always try to plant it by Halloween as part of our vampire-protection plan — and overwintered under thick mulch. We’ve saved and planted our softneck, purple-tinged garlic for several years now, and we were loathe to lose this well-adapted landrace variety that had been performing exceptionally well and producing steady, reliable harvests of nice-sized, pungent bulbs.  We didn’t want to keep driving to the old garden plot solely to tend the garlic, although we would have if necessary — I wouldn’t know what to do if I had to start buying garlic at the store! A homesteader-gardener’s nightmare!

If we were to plant the garlic where the garden is going to be, we’d have to break up pasture– mostly  brome grass — fertilize, and work around the mobile pig pen and run. A good friend recommended planting the garlic where the construction process had already opened up the soil, and where we were hoping to keep herbs and flowers (as opposed to prairie grasses, as with most of the property). Instead of planting a showy pollinator flower garden, we opted to fill in the space in our “front yard” with two beds of garlic and, on a whim, a bed of winter-hardy arugula, kale and spinach. Even if the greens don’t come up in time to enjoy in winter, they’ll be ready to cut super-early in spring. We’ll surround the greens with straw and cover them with salvaged windows to help hold the warmth while still allowing sunshine to reach the plants.

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