Hello everybody! It's the end of October in Ohio, so that means it's time for
planting garlic. I'm going to show you a really quick visual tutorial of the cut
and dry parts of planting and then stick around if you want to learn a few tips
and tricks for a fabulous garlic harvest. Let's jump in!
Tip number one-- How to choose between hard neck and soft neck. A lot of this
really comes down to personal preference but here are the basic differences. Hard
neck varieties have hard necks- but really it's this formation of a long
flowering stem which you will see referred to as scapes. People like to
harvest these in the late spring/early summer and they're quite tasty. But upon
maturity those stems will become quite hard and they're dry now so they're
really brittle- but they don't have any bend to them and you can see why they're
called hard neck. Soft necks on the other hand don't form that long flowering
stalk and when they're harvested their stems are quite soft and pliable. So this
is a variety that you'll see people use for these lovely garlic braids because
you can easily twist and braid the stems of soft neck varieties. Another
difference between hard necks and soft necks are in the bulbs themselves. So soft necks
kind of tend to have a lot more individual cloves in the bulbs, sometimes
they tend to be smaller cloves and the also tend to have very tight skins or wrappers.
And this will actually help softnecks to often store
a lot better than hardnecks do. Hardnecks kind of have one layer of usually quite
large cloves and they're a little bit easier to separate and peel. They tend to
have thicker but less tightly wrapped skins and while there are hard neck
varieties that store really great, in general they don't store quite as long
as the softnecks- just because of that wrapper habit.
And the last difference between hardnecks and
soft necks is that some garlic aficionados will claim that hard
necks have a richer more robust. more truly garlic flavor, while the soft necks
tend to have a little bit milder, more vegetal flavor that's better for raw
consumption, but maybe not so much for roasting and cooking. But again there are
so many different varieties even within the two groups that you'll find that
there are huge flavor differences even amongst the soft necks and the hard necks.
Tip number two-- garlic likes to have nice loose loamy soil with a lot of organic
matter in it so if you tend to have a little bit heavier soil, which I do here,
it's nice to work in some rich compost or organic matter into the soil prior to
planting. If you have really heavy dense clay soil working your beds up into kind
of a raised bed or raised row with organic matter is a really nice way to
promote drainage as well. You'll want the pH to be between about 6 & 7.
I usually don't fertilize at all in the fall. I will work compost into the soil
sometimes but I've had better results with just focusing on using a nitrogen
rich fertilizer first thing in the spring when that top growth starts and
then also about the mid to end of May when those bulbs start to swell I'll give it
another application and that usually will promote nice big garlic bulbs for harvest.
Tip number three-- fall is for planting!
While in some areas of the country you can get away with a spring planted
garlic, you're gonna have a lot better results most often with planting in the
fall. For most areas you're going to want to plant about three to five weeks before
your ground is frozen hard. In areas in the South where you don't get frozen
ground, late November through mid-December is a good time. And if you
do have to plant in the spring just make sure you get out there and plant as
early in the spring as possible!