Planting Garlic

California Late White Garlic

"It smells like stew." That was the best description of garlic I've ever heard, and it came from one of my 7-year old students. We were exploring the color, shape, and aroma of garlic as we prepared for planting a row of the pungent staple in our small school garden, and I was struggling to give context to this unfamiliar food. Unlike, other vegetables like carrots and potatoes that children often encounter whole, garlic is the seldom seen, but invaluable, stage-hand that makes almost every meal savory. It's also one of the few crops that can actively occupy a garden row over our cold, cold winter months.

The cloves rehydrate in rainwater before planting

Garlic cloves need a long cold -near freezing- period in order to trigger healthy growth in the spring, and so it's planted late in the fall. The roots quickly take hold after planting, and then wait patiently under the mulch and winter snow until the spring sun begins to warm the soil in April. Strong, frost-resistant leaves quickly emerge and take advantage of the winter moisture still held in the soil, requiring little to no additional watering--it's for this reason that garlic is one of the best suited crops for our dry climate. The young shoots are called green garlic and have a flavor similar to, but stronger than, scallions. However, the over-eager harvester will be disappointed that the clove at the base of the plant will look much like the ones planted before winter. It's not until late-May or June that the clove begins to swell and multiply into the stinky rose we all love.

The cloves are properly spaced before a quick push into the soil

There are two general categories of garlic; hard-neck and soft-neck. The latter being the common California White garlic we see in grocery stores and braided into ristras. In addition to the aesthetics of the beautiful braids, it's primary attribute is it's long storage life. The former, hard-neck garlic, is the true prince of the family. Growing larger cloves and having a wide variety of flavors and heat profiles, varieties like Spanish roja and German white command top prices at farmers markets' and in seed catalogs. Hard-necks also give the timely harvester the gourmand treat of spicy garlic scapes-- the beautiful swan like flower spikes that emerge when the cloves begin to swell. These are cut to encourage large clove growth. Unlike previous years, I procrastinated ordering my garlic, and with Thanksgiving break (and a trip to Pittsburgh) fast approaching, I resorted to only planting soft-necks this year, which I purchased at the La Montanita Co-op-- caution: regular

grocery stores often sell garlic treated with a growth inhibitor. Breaking apart each clump, I planted the large outer cloves and saved the smaller inner cloves for cooking. About 2 pounds of garlic yielded a 100 large cloves and were planted in 40' of row space, 4" apart.