Ah, the joys of late October—giving treats tomonster-clad kids, glorying in the trees’ technicolor display, putting in the first plantings of my 2016 vegetable garden…
Wait… what? Planting veggies in October?
Yep, you read that right, because in northern Illinois late October is the perfect time to plant the MVP of my veggie garden—garlic!
Garlic? A veggie-garden MVP?
Well, how can you not love a crop that always gives you 100 percent germination success every planting season? Or that you can eat at any time of the growing year, from any part of the plant?Or that has no natural predators and requires virtually no care at all? Or that stays fresh enough to use in recipes all year long once harvested?
As an added bonus, whatever you don’t eat can be pushed into the ground next October to start the following year’s crop. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, forever—as long as you don’t get greedy and eat it all.
I started my career as a garlic farmer more than ten years ago, when I ran into a guy at the Illinois State Fair selling a tasty strain of garlic he called “Frisco Red.” As the name implies, its clove hulls area deep red in color. And when eaten, you can really taste the Frisco—whatever that tastes like.
This year, I will be planting the great-great-many-times-great grandcloves of those original beauties he sold me. I also plant cloves from a white garlic bulb I bought at the Jewel produce section a few years ago, which produce larger, tighter bulbs that last a bit longer in the pantry or the fridge.(Some folks think that grocery store produce is treated somehow so it won’t grow if planted. Not true, at least for garlic.)
Best of all, because garlic plants need only three or four inches of spacing from the next plant, I can plant my entire bumper crop of 12-20 bulbs in no more than a couple square feet of ground. I tuck it next to the foundation of the house, where it won’t take up space dedicated to my wife’s lilies or peonies. And although my garlic patch is on the east side of the house and only gets a few hours of sunshine each day, the garlic doesn’t seem to mind.
How can you not love it?
There’s no trick to planting garlic, beyond pulling apart a “fist” of garlic to separate it into cloves, and then making sure that you plant each clove with the pointy end up. I wait until late October and then plant them about 3-4 inches deep with about a four-inch spacing, and if I have a bit of compost I mix it in. Or not. The garlic doesn’t seem to mind either way.
And then I wait.
If November is a bit warmer or wetter than usual, they will probably start sending up green shoots by Thanksgiving—but that’s OK. Young, sprouting garlic doesn’t even mind getting snowed on and sitting patiently beneath the ice before it can get back to the business of growing tall and tasty.
By early June they will be knee-high or taller, with their blade-shaped leaves resembling lilies. The leaves can be clipped a bit and sprinkled on a salad or a sandwich. The garlic won’t mind.
By mid-June each plant will send up a single tender coiled stalk from its tippy-top which, if left alone, will rise up and become a pretty flower and seed-head. When it does this, it’s time for you to do the only work a garlic plant asks from you: snip the stalk off as soon as it appears.If you don’t, the plant will spend all its energy building a flower instead of a meaty fist of cloves.
The stalk is called a “scape,” and it’s not only juicy and delicious when chopped and sprinkled on a salad or draped over roasting meat, it will keep for several weeks in the fridge in a plastic bag.
A word of caution, though: don’t drop the scape-bud into the dirt or it will germinate into dozens of tiny garlic plants with a little monkey’s paw as a bulb. That’s how willing garlic is to give you a bumper crop. It’s like the energizer bunny of a harvest table cornucopia.
Sometime around mid-July, you’ll notice that the lower leaves of the garlic plant have started to turn brown. Once the dry leaves have reached halfway up the plant, it’s time to dig up the bulb, for by then it has grown as much as it will.If you wait too long, the papery protective sheathing around the bulb may split, which will limit its shelf time.
It’s best to harvest the bulbs when the soil is a bit dry, so you can just shake off the dirt. You may want to rinse them lightly, but don’t scrub off the bulb’s papery covering. I hang them upside-down in a dark place like the garage or a pantry until the leaves are entirely dry, then clip the stem and store the bulbs in the pantry or the fridge.
That’s all there is to it! Nothing in your garden could be easier.
In your kitchen you probably have a garlic clove or two that has begun to shrivel and lose its appeal as a recipe ingredient. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t still willing to get in the gardening game. I have planted two-year-old cloves that were bone-dry and little more than husks, just to see if they would germinate. They popped up just fine.
So go ahead! It’s late October—garlic planting time!
And then, when your phone rings sometime in January and the person at the other end asks, “What are you doing right now?” you can look out at the bleak frozen landscape, sip your coffee and say, “Me? I’m gardening!”
