Garden Geek: Planting & Maintaining A No-Dig Garlic Bed

It is time to plant garlic. I have a hodgepodge here. Honestly, I just picked up a bunch of different heads of garlic and I just didn't label them, but they're a combination of music garlic, which is a hardneck, a German red, oh, and a couple of others thrown in there as well. I have a order of ancillium garlic, which I love to grow, but that hasn't arrived yet. So I'll be planting that when that does arrive. This is a good time to plant garlic, although I can continue to plant garlic up until early November and it'll be just fine. You really want to give your garlic time to establish roots in the ground during the fall. Garlic, hardneck garlic particularly, needs a period of cold under about 48 degrees for many, many days over the course of the winter, and we generally are able to achieve that, although the climate keeps getting warmer and warmer. This is the outside border of my garden, and you can see I had some peppers that are ready to come out now, and I've had, I had watermelons growing in here and some pepper plants as well. On the other side of the fence are peppers and basil, and that will be coming out shortly, but right now I just want to get this established in this zone of growing here. This area is about a two and a half foot wide strip, and it's bordered on the outside here by a wood chip path. The way that this bed was originally built was I had put down large hay bales all along here and left them for a season. One year I actually planted into those hay bales, and then they gradually decomposed, and then became, you know, part of the earth itself. Since that time, in about the last three years, I've just been planting this as a bed and adding to it as mulch. So I'm going to start here by just digging out or pulling out any weeds that I see, any grass starts or anything like that, and then I'm going to pull this mulch slightly back. I'm going to be adding it back in. I'm going to cut down that pepper plant over there. The thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a fork, a garden fork, or you could use a broad fork. I'm just going to aerate the soil a little, just by kind of working it back and forth just a little bit. I built it just straight on the field. There might be some rocks and things down here, which I might, might behoove me to get rid of. So I'm not plowing, I'm just sort of uplifting the earth just a little bit, working it back and forth, loosening it up. If I feel a rock, as I do right now, I'll try to get in there and get it out, because the garlic's not going to like growing on rock. See how nice and friable the soil is at this point? So you can see I'm just loosening things up a little. I have a broad fork, but honestly, for this little bit of work, I'm just using a regular garden fork. Generally in a no-dig system, you want to avoid walking on your beds. You want to avoid that compaction. What's amazing is this is hard clay soil normally, and after the several years now of the no-dig garden, it has become really quite workable, as I've just added layers of organic material straight on top of the ground. I think the key on this bed was really just putting those hay bales straight down that first year and leaving them for the winter. There's a rock. See? I'm gonna get those guys out of there. Beautiful homemade compost, and I'm just gonna sprinkle a good layer of that compost all in here. Organisms are just gonna love that. You don't have to dig it in. We're gonna cover all this up with mulch. Spread this out really nicely. Now we're gonna plant the garlic. Break apart the leaves, the cloves. This is the root end. You can see where it was attached. You're gonna put it pointy end up, and you're gonna put it about an inch to two inches, an inch to two inches above the clove. You're gonna point the pointy end up, one clove at a time, about approximately six inches apart. Let's go ahead and do it. First, I'm just gonna place the garlic in the ground, and you'll be amazed at how far, how far one head of garlic will go. This is a hardneck garlic. The way that I can tell it's a hardneck garlic is, here's the stem that comes up through the middle, and the cloves grow around it. This is a better variety to grow in these parts. I will probably just plant the largest cloves, and then save the smaller ones for eating in the house. Again, you want them about four to six inches apart. These are kind of puny. I think I'll eat those. Put them in my pocket. I hope I won't forget. Here's another hardneck garlic. I can tell because of the stem coming up through the middle. I'm hoping that by planting this on the border land of my garden, it might help deter things like voles and things like that from getting into the garden. You want to keep the protective cover on the garlic, the papery cover on your garlic. You can expect the garlic to start coming up, actually, before winter, and don't let that freak you out. Garlic is pretty darn tough. It'll come up and then it'll just hang out in the winter. The bulbs themselves need that cold period, especially hardneck garlic, to get the bulb big enough. This past year was a tough year for garlic. I think we had a pretty...didn't have enough rain in the springtime when it needed it, and it was just kind of tough. I've noticed that the garlic for seed in this area is pretty small compared to what it usually is, and at the garlic festival, the garlic growers themselves said that it was a tough year for growing garlic. They didn't have the yields that they normally have, and I would agree with that. Mine were not bulbing up in a nice way and weren't doing their...it was okay, and I got a harvest, but it wasn't a bumper crop. I have spaced the garlic all throughout this row, this planting area, and now I'm just going to go ahead and plant them. I've got my trowel out, and I'm going to plant them, dig down, loosen the soil beneath, stick that garlic in there, cover it up, dig down, stick it in, cover it up, down, stick it in, cover it up, and you're just going to continue to do this, and come spring, your garlic will come up in the winter, most likely, at least in this climate, it certainly will. I don't like this one because the shell came off, so I'm going to pop another one in there, not the shell, the paper. I got a few more left that didn't fit in here. Yeah, I think that's going to be much better. Garlic does like to have lots of organic material in the soil, likes it to be good and loose. The soil has started to cool down now, and I want to keep it that way for this garlic. When I first planted garlic, I was very intimidated. I thought, oh gosh, this is going to be so hard, and, you know, it's truly not. It's truly not hard at all. In fact, I think most things are easy to plant and easy to grow. Some things just take a little bit more finesse, or they need particular conditions to make them happy, but generally speaking, generally speaking, garlic is one of the easiest things to grow. You just have to have patience because it does take a long time. When will this garlic be ready? Well, the garlic will be ready in this area, planted about this time of year. I usually harvest mine around June 10th to 15th, and that usually is all I need to do. This year, I was a little bit negligent. We just had a real rough spring family-wise with the illness and the family with my father-in-law and such, so I didn't, I wasn't very attentive to my garlic, and honestly, I didn't, I wasn't home here consistently enough to really keep it watered as it needed to be when the spring was too dry. Normally, with the rains in the spring, you just put the garlic in the ground, mulch it over, and it grows, and it doesn't, it really doesn't require much water, but so hopefully this year. Oh, a slug. Slug, I don't really want you near my garden, but I know you live here too. Garlic is strong. It will push up through a lot of things. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to add a nice layer of hay on top of this, so it's going to add even more organic matter. When the spring comes and those garlics are poking through, we may even add a Another reason I like to plant garlic is because it's a crop that is relatively easy and early to harvest in the summertime, at least in this area it is, and that means that in this area where I'm planting, when I pull out the garlic, I'll have time to get some other things planted. What might I plant? Well, I might plant, it's not too late at that point to plant a watermelon plant that would be a late harvest watermelon, not a run of the big huge ones, but something like a sugar baby. Springtime, when these are starting to get their robust growth, I may give them a dose of liquid fertilizer of some sort, like a fish emulsion or something like that, just to kind of get them going a little bit more. I think I got everybody planted. I'm going to cover up this area with a nice layer of hay mulch, just like I did with my other garlic that I planted, the elephant garlic that I planted up in my kitchen garden. This will dry out. It'll add additional organic material. The lovely worms will come up and do their thing. Don't freak out with the funguses and mushrooms. This is part of the breakdown process. The fungi are helping to break down that hay and organic material and make a good, nice, rich soil. So that is the first planting of the hardneck garlic for the year. I'll be planting some more garlic in other places. Let me show you that. But basically it's always the same process for me. What was a little bit different on this one is, because this bed is the way it was built originally, I did the forking of the ground first. So we're just going to leave that. I may put additional mulch on it as this mulch settles down to keep any weeds out and to keep that soil nice and cool so that this garlic takes root and gets its 40, its days of 48 degrees that it needs in soil temperature. Thank you so much for watching today. I hope your garden's growing well and I encourage you to, if you haven't already, to grow some garlic. It's good for you. Hey, if you like to grow food and garden and you love to cook what you grow, this channel may be one for you. So you'll want to like and subscribe. And don't forget to share this channel with your friends. It's a relatively new channel. I'm trying to grow it so you can help me grow. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye. Golly, what a gorgeous, gorgeous afternoon.