Timing: Sometime in the second half of October, ideally about five weeks before frost is in the ground, I plant the biggest cloves from the biggest heads of my July-harvested crop. (I eat the rest, whether while cooking up easy soups and tomato sauce to freeze in the late summer and fall, or through the winter from heads hung in net bags in my 45ish-degree barn loft, with some of the harvest peeled and frozen right now like this to use next spring and summer, when even the best-stored heads would have sprouted otherwise.)
An expert 101 on how to plant garlic, and which type is best for your area.How deep? I poke the cloves, pointy side up, so that the tip is about 2 inches below the surface of the soil in my raised beds. Mulching at planting time in areas with cold winters is recommended, so I simply layer on some leaf mold or composted stable bedding, which also helps come spring in weed control (it’s essential to keep garlic beds weed-free!).
How far apart? Spacing is easy, because the distance from the tip of my pinky finger to the tip of my thumb when I stretch my hand as wide as I can is 8 inches. Garlic likes about 5-9 inches between cloves in the row, and also between rows—and 8 (which falls in that range nicely) is my
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