Okay, I finally got some garlic to plant...hopefully at the right time for my area -zone 5b or 6.

Do I soak the individual cloves first before I set them out in the garden, and if so, for about how long? Will I need to mulch these after the ground freezes, or will they be better off left uncovered?

This is my very first attempt, so any advice will be welcome.

Hi Chelle - no, don't soak the cloves; plant them at the same time you'd put in daffodil or tulip bulbs (I do mine from mid to late October). Be sure to put the root end of the clove down I don't generally mulch them, at most I cover them loosely with some "floating row cover." By the time the snow is gone my garlic plants are usually about 6" tall, so I wouldn't want to be raking mulch off them; although it might actually work out pretty well if the mulch was "fluffy" and mostly broke down over the course of the winter, then you could just leave it in place. I do put a couple of inches of compost over the entire area, after planting the cloves.

I think you'll be quite pleasantly surprised at how easy garlic is to grow!!

Really...you wait that late? Here I thought they needed to be in by the end of August! Now I'm prepared too far in advance...I'll probably forget to plant them!

Okay...compost is good, I have plenty of that. My biggest concern is rot. Onions I can grow successfully in the flower beds but all of the ones I've tried in the veggie patch have failed. Do you wait a while after planting to add the compost? We're usually so very rainy and wet all the way up till the snow flies...

Check the temperature of the soil at about 4 inches deep. When the soil at that depth is below 60 degrees you can plant. Take your temp readings in the morning, not the evening.

That should coincide with the early to mid-October date from Sandy.

Thank you both so very much!

I'm not sure about the rot issue, Chelle -- I've never had that problem with the garlic, but then, I've never had it with my onions either... Maybe someone else here will have more info in that department!

I think garlic is less sensitive to that than onions. The latter seem to need very good drainage while I've successfully grown garlic in every kind of soil imaginable!

dave said:I think garlic is less sensitive to that than onions. The latter seem to need very good drainage while I've successfully grown garlic in every kind of soil imaginable!

Yay! I'll stop sweating the small stuff then and concentrate instead on reciting to myself, "must plant the garlic, must plant the garlic..." ...don't forget the garlic...

One warning, which may be obvious, but wasn't to me. I planted garlic in a raised bed (18" deep raised bed). It was way to exposed to the cold, and there was nothing but traces of garlic slime in the spring. It was kind of an expensive lesson, close to $30 worth of garlic. I am a zone or so colder than you, but - be warned.

Thanks Geof. I'll keep it out of the raised area, just in case.

Geof -- was there snow cover? Last winter was so brutal (as you know as well as I do), I really wondered how my garlic would do (not in a raised bed, in ground -- but the frost went SO far down I didn't think things would ever thaw out) -- it did have a lot of snow over it, thankfully, and every single clove that I planted (about 150 of them) came up. Which is better than I normally can expect! I'm kind of wondering if your problem wasn't more from the unusually wet fall (I'm assuming you had a lot of rain last fall like we did ??) and then again in the spring One thing is for sure -- when it comes to growing stuff, there's always something that happens to throw a monkey wrench into your plans.

There was definitely snow cover. It Wisconsin after all Maybe if I had planted it in the center of the bed there would have been enough insulation, but I planted it all around the perimeter, so only 3" of dirt between the cloves and the cedar boards. I just wasn't thinking !

Y'all have completely different growing conditions than I. Mississippi doesn't get a lot of snow or sub-zero weather. All my garlic is in a raised garden. I even raised it another foot last summer because I wanted better drainage. The garden is now 2 1/2 feet above ground level. Moisture is my main concern, particularly excess moisture in late winter/early spring. That's when garlic needs to be on the dry side to really fill out. I can successfully grow all garlic - hardneck, softneck, and Creole. You might be limited to only hardneck.

mandolls said:There was definitely snow cover. It Wisconsin after all Maybe if I had planted it in the center of the bed there would have been enough insulation, but I planted it all around the perimeter, so only 3" of dirt between the cloves and the cedar boards. I just wasn't thinking !

Well, one would think "definitely snow cover," but we've certainly had years when there wasn't that much! And yes, maybe being near the edges of the raised beds made it more susceptible to -- DEATH!

Ken -- serious understatement to say that our growing conditions are different... but softneck garlic seems to do well for me, and I'm still hopeful that the Creole will grow as long as I have it under a hoophouse... time will tell!

Sandy, if you can grow softneck successfully, I don't see why Creole won't grow successfully as well.

The garlic I bought for planting was from a local produce farm, so it seems like it should have a fighting chance at least. I'm thinking that as long as I don't plant them in the same types of conditions wherein I've lost tulips, they should be okay.

drdawg said:Sandy, if you can grow softneck successfully, I don't see why Creole won't grow successfully as well.

I hope you're right, Ken! Having such long-storing garlic would be wonderful... there is nothing like fresh garlic for cooking, as I was reminded last night after making garlic butter shrimp for supper using some of my recent harvest

I have discovered, though, that my garlic "chips" -- the dried slices that I store for grinding into garlic powder -- work really well and are really convenient to use for making pickles, etc.; they plump right back up and you'd never know they had once been dried.

Chelle, at least deer won't eat your garlic like they do tulips -- which I've totally given up on trying to grow.

I have found that NO animal eats or digs up the garlic, at least none in our neck of the woods, such as squirrel, coon, deer, possum, or armadillo.

None have ever bothered mine, either... I wonder if interplanting garlic with things the deer and rabbits (my 2 biggest problems) do like would keep them away. Might have to do an experiment with that idea!

That just might work. I forgot to list rabbits. I do know one thing. Rabbits and deer absolutely love sweet potato leaves. I have to fence those plants in or I would quickly be wiped out...