Growing Garlic at Home – Planting it…

IMG_2470, originally uploaded by http://badhuman.wordpress.com.

We (N. and J.) love garlic. And we use a lot of it. I (J.) would go as far as saying that 2/3 of what we cook at home probably has garlic in it.

This last year, N. and I experimented with container gardening, since we don’t have any arable land of our own. We had some successes and plenty of failures, but mostly we learned a lot. Determined to have more success this year, decided to decide on what we were going to plant this fall. When we decided on garlic, we discovered that it’s best to plant it the fall before its intended harvest season. That worked well for us, since N. in particular was really lookin’ to get her farmin’ on since we moved to Philly.

N. found several tasty varieties at Gourmet Garlic Gardens. The instructions for planting are pretty straight-forward, and we only had to buy one extra long window box (about a yard long by eight inches high) to stick them in; we already had three smaller boxes, each about 20 inches long by eight inches high.

We chose a mix of soil that we’d recovered from our previous potting attempts and hummus and manure that we picked up. Hopefully next year we’ll have enough vermipost to not have to buy any nutrient-rich mix to go with our dirt.

Anyway, planting garlic is pretty easy. From everything we’ve read, they get about six inches all around, and go about four inches below the surface (as per our planting zone). I’m still pretty curious to see how these little guys will weather the winter here, especially since the sides of the container will obviously get lots of cold air circulating all around. That being said, apparently garlic likes the cold. That’s good since I’m sure they’ll get plenty of that.

Stay tuned for round two (next spring of course:)