Planting

We started our planting on October 15th this year and completed about 12,000 plantings by the 22nd.  We continue to explore different ways to improve our productivity, as garlic on a small scale is largely a manual operation.  We created a section of our website - "Growing Garlic"  to share the approaches that we have taken to improve yield while growing in a sustainable way that meets the organic farm standards.

I modified our Maschio tractor driven rototiller with collecting "wings" to help create raised beds which we feel are necessary in the wetter northwest to ensure good drainage.  While this modification worked fairly good we still needed to dig out the trenches between the rows to complete the raised bed height to about 8-10 inches.  This year we elected to decrease the space between rows to a walking path for weeding and managing the crop, whereas last  year we had approximately 50/50 rows and working space based on 6 foot rows.  We found that this created a 6 foot weed patch between the rows, and have felt that a higher ratio of planted area to pathway will save us work.

We planted several hardneck cultivars including Chesnok Red and Persian Star purple stripe, some Leningrad and Russian Red Porcelain, a small test plot of Music and two types of softnecks - Russian Early and Saltspring.  We are still evaluating the market:  the porcelains tend to be bigger and sell well, but the purple stripes have more "gusto"!

To plant we made a simple stamping tool for creating uniform spaces between the plants and planted on a 6 inch by 8 inch grid, planting about 1-2 inches below the surface depending on clove size - the big ones a little deeper than the small ones.

For those starting out, I suggest meticulous labeling of your different plots, as it is very easy to forget which plots contain specific types of garlic.  This year we planted some test plots - for the bulk of our crop we used medium to large size bulbs for our seed, but also ended up with a smaller number of small cloves and we have wondered if they will produce reasonable size plants.  Next summer will tell, as we planted some test plants to help unravel this and we will be sharing the information at that time.