Be A Better Gardener: A Gardening Encore

By Thomas Christopher

One of my favorite episodes of the vegetable gardening year is when my wife Suzanne and I go out in October to plant the next year’s garlic crop. Unlike the spring and summer planting seasons for other edibles, when I’m juggling all sorts of other chores and have to hurry through sowing seeds or transplanting seedlings, garlic planting comes after I’ve mostly put the garden to bed. I’ve pulled the debris from the other crops and trundled it off to the compost bin, and sown in the cover crops that will preserve the soil through the winter. Poking those garlic cloves into the spot reserved for them is a more leisurely business, one that is carried out amid the cooler weather and gentler sunlight that makes autumn my favorite season in the Northeast. It’s a pleasurable horticultural encore.

Besides, garlic is such a carefree crop. The pungent odor and flavor that I love in sauces evolved as a means of defense against creatures who would otherwise eat the plants, and it remains very effective against non-hominids. Whereas I am always watching other vegetable and fruit crops somewhat nervously to guard against attacks from hungry wildlife, my garlic has never suffered from those sorts of incursions. It does have a relatively high need for fertility. I applied an early spring dose of nitrogen-rich blood meal, and langbeinite, a natural source of potassium, as was called for in my soil test results. However, I failed to enrich the soil before planting and applying a side-dressing of nitrogen at the beginning of May as recommended, and the garlic heads I harvested in July were not as large as I would have liked.

Aside from soil fertility, the only other issue I have met with in growing garlic is making sure that the plants get enough but not too much moisture. Garlic, like most bulbs, must be grown in well-drained soil, but if there should be a dry spell during its season of active growth in spring and summer, you should water it deeply at least once a week.

One bonus of garlic that Asian-descended friends have taught me to prize are the “scapes,” the flower stalks that pop up from the garlic plants in June. I had long made a point of snipping the scapes off at their bases before the flower buds opened so that the plants didn’t divert energy from bulb-making to seed production. Until my friends intervened, however, I didn’t know how sweet and tender they are when chopped up and tossed into a stir-fry. 

When purchasing so-called “seed garlic,” bulbs that you separate into the cloves you plant in the soil, you are likely to find a bewildering array of varieties for sale. The most important distinction is between “softneck” and “hardneck” types. The hardneck garlics, as the name suggest, have a stiff, hard stem that emerges from the center top of the bulbs, whereas the stems of the softneck bulbs are flexible. Hardnecks tend to be better adapted to cold climates and typically have a spicier, more complex flavor. They are harder to weave into braids, which is the way I prefer to store my harvest. Fortunately, my wife grew up with long braids of her own and the skills she perfected then enables her to assemble hardneck garlics into acceptable braids once I have pulled them from the soil and left them in a cool shaded spot to dry for a week or two. The signal that harvest time has arrived, incidentally, is that the plant turns yellow or brown.

I generally purchase seed garlic new every year from one of the online suppliers who offer a wide choice of organically grown cultivars that have tested free of disease and nematodes. Many friends, however, save the biggest bulbs from the previous year’s harvest to separate into cloves and plant for the next year’s crop. They report good success with this practice. Some claim that this approach eventually leads to the evolution of a race of garlic specially adapted to your soil conditions and local climate. I doubt that. Growing garlic from cloves separated from bulbs of the previous year’s harvest is essentially — each new plant will be genetically identical to the parent, so the plants do not evolve. That’s a small loss, though, in comparison to all the benefits homegrown garlic provides 

Be-a-Better-Gardener is a community service of Berkshire Botanical Garden, located in Stockbridge, Mass. Its mission, to provide knowledge of gardening and the environment through a diverse range of classes and programs, informs and inspires thousands of students and visitors each year. Thomas Christopher is a volunteer at Berkshire Botanical Garden and is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books, including Nature into Art and The Gardens of Wave Hill (Timber Press, 2019). He is the 2021 Garden Club of America's National Medalist for Literature, a distinction reserved to recognize those who have left a profound and lasting impact on issues that are most important to the GCA. Christopher’s companion broadcast to this column, Growing Greener, streams on WESUFM.org, Pacifica Radio and NPR and is available at berkshirebotanical.org/growinggreener.