492 - Where to Plant Garlic (next summer considerations)

Jill McSheehy (0:02)

Garlic planting is coming up, and I have said for years that garlic is the easiest crop that I grow. That's why I encourage everyone to plant garlic, especially beginners, because it's a great crop to plant now, and know you're gonna get a harvest without much work. Now, even after all these years, even after a frustrating garlic harvest this year, which I'll talk to you about in just a minute, I still stand by garlic being one of the easiest crops to grow. But if you are new to planting garlic, I highly recommend my garlic growing mini course to get you started. So many people have gone through it and have sent me photos of their garlic harvest in the summer. It works. It's a great place to start if you wanna grow garlic. Now, I've talked a lot about garlic. As you can see, I'm actually pretty passionate about it. But there's one topic I don't know that I've ever discussed, and it's what I wanted to talk to you about today. And that is when it comes time to plant your garlic, which is soon, where do you put it in your garden? Now, it's not like you don't have options. You absolutely do, because if you're planting it around your first frost date, most likely you're gonna have a whole lot of space to choose from because your summer crops are going to be gone. And that may make you think that you can just plant it anywhere because you have all this space. And while that's technically true, there are a couple of considerations that you might want to keep in mind. So let's back up just to make sure if you're brand new, you want to plant garlic in the fall. You want to plant it now right around your first frost date. And if you don't get a frost, probably you're still looking at somewhere around November at some point. The thing is is that they won't start meaningfully growing until the spring. That's very normal. If you live in a much more northern climate, you may not see shoots from your garlic bulbs right away. But many of us do. That's completely normal. I remember my first time growing garlic. I panicked because I planted the garlic cloves thinking that they were just going to hibernate over the winter. I'm sure there's an actual technical term for that. But you know what I mean.

But they didn't. They started growing. And I'm like, oh no, did I do something wrong? Are they going to be able to make it through my winter? And in Arkansas, of course, they did.

But they are going to be mostly not growing much over the winter, whether they stay underneath if you're in a cold climate or they do give you some shoots. Most likely, they're just going to be shoots, small shoots for most of the winter. And then they don't start growing again until the temperatures start warming up a little bit. And then the day length starts lengthening. I definitely start seeing my garlic start to grow significantly, probably the end of January, early February.

That will be a little bit later depending on how cool you are in the winter. But you expect, and this is the important part, you will not be expecting them to harvest until generally sometime between May and July depending on where you're located. If you're further south, you're probably looking more like May and even earlier May. If you're further north, this might be a July harvest for you. I kind of in the middle am typically harvesting mine in June. That's usually when I expect to harvest my garlic. And here's why that's important. It's because your garlic is being planted in your garden, and it's going to occupy that space throughout the period of time that you are going to be growing some of your earliest spring crops. And here's what I found when I was doing custom garden plans, I do them from time to time where I planned people's gardens for them. And when I was doing these custom fall garden plans this year, there were several instances with several people's gardens where maybe they just had two or three raised beds. And obviously, they had all of this space, they wanted to grow garlic, and we could fill those beds with garlic very easily. There's plenty of room, but I had to pause there because I had to think through and even ask, how important is garlic to you?

And what do you plan on planting in the spring? Because the place where this garlic is going to be growing is going to be growing in the same place that you're going to need some space for your cool season crops in the spring, such as broccoli, carrots, cabbage, onions, if you're planting onions in the spring, lettuce, greens, that they're gonna need the space at the same time. And so with that in mind, we want to treat garlic as our first spring planting, our first planting of the next year. So if I'm in 2026 right now, I'm treating garlic as my first planting for 2027 And with that in mind, it helps me to see how much of my space do I want with garlic compared to where I want that space to be used in the spring planting.