I Planted Garlic Yesterday

[DougGuy]

I had 3 tubs full of top soil and miracle grow so I put garlic in all 3 of them. I had some choice purple striped hardneck garlic from walmart, Spice World, each head in plastic shrink wrap, with HUGE cloves, not elephant garlic just big cloves. This was some primo garlic, very good quality, and you want to choose the big cloves to plant so it makes a bigger bulb.

Now here's the 64 dollar question.. When you plant the clove, root end down and pointed end up, but which way do you rotate the clove when you plant it? Do the leaves, which are in a single plane like a church fan, if you rotate the cloves different directions when you plant, does that affect the radial direction of the leaves?

If you rotate one clove toward you, and the next clove 90° will the leaves grow at 90° angles of orientation?

[farmbif]

some bulbs if they are strong, have lots of vigor will try to right themselves. but your best off planting in correct orientation right off the bat especially with garlic where the cloves of garlic are held together in the bulb is the root end. the pointed end goes up thats where the shoot or leaves will come out. I have garlic gone �� in front yard on a steep slope that spreads wider and longer every year. garlic usually needs well drained sandy soil kind of like what blueberries need but not acidic from what I know but it is growing like crazy here in heavy clay and chert soil possibly because it is a steep slope and drains well.

[brokeasajoke]

I planted some garlic this summer and know nothing about it as I've never messed with it before. It just now seems to be coming up

[Polymath]

I did mine yesterday too. 4 short rows 4 to 6" deep and 4" apart have been having good success with what I do. We'll see what happens next spring.

[Winger Ed.]

Years ago, I had pod someone gave me.
I'm not a big garlic eater, but I planted it, and forgot about it.
I don't know how it landed, up or down, I just dropped it in a hole and kicked dirt back over it.
In a couple years-- That stuff tried to take over the back yard.

It kept spreading out like something from a science fiction movie.

[Dom]

I have been growing the Red, hard neck variety for years. A full flavored, large clove garlic. Haven't planted mine yet this year, but will soon. Usually first week in Nov. Love it.

[square butte]

I plant mine pointed end up - about 4 inches deep and about 5 inches apart. Here, I plant in mid october to mid november - Do it before the ground freezes hard. We get 20 below 0 here, so cover with about 2 feet of dry leaves or straw for insulation so it won't freeze out in the winter. Uncover in the spring when the danger of hard frost is over - but not heads of garlin\on a super warm day, or the sun will cook the nice new shoots. Pull about the second week in July or when the necks just above the ground begin to soften a little bit. Don't wait too long to pull it .especially if it's been wet - or the nice papery wrapping will rot and the heads won't store well. Been doing it that way for 20 years or so and it works out OK if i do my part. We had about 120 heads this year
One last thing - when you see the scapes (seed Heads) start to develop in earlty summer, cut them off before they develop too much. The scape will be more tender when you sautee them - And the plant will put more energy into developing heads of garlic than seeds .
Garlic loves nitrogen rich soil ( as do all the alliums ) - so manure, blood meal and fish emulsion as soil prep and amendments

[Tatume]

My brother has such a problem with bears and deer eating his garden that garlic is about the only thing he can grow.

[MaryB]

Every time my garlic came up in spring the robins showed up and dug it all up and ate it!

[JonB_in_Glencoe]

I had 3 tubs full of top soil and miracle grow so I put garlic in all 3 of them. I had some choice purple striped hardneck garlic from walmart, Spice World, each head in plastic shrink wrap, with HUGE cloves, not elephant garlic just big cloves. This was some primo garlic, very good quality, and you want to choose the big cloves to plant so it makes a bigger bulb.

Now here's the 64 dollar question.. When you plant the clove, root end down and pointed end up, but which way do you rotate the clove when you plant it? Do the leaves, which are in a single plane like a church fan, if you rotate the cloves different directions when you plant, does that affect the radial direction of the leaves?

If you rotate one clove toward you, and the next clove 90° will the leaves grow at 90° angles of orientation?
I learned it's best to plant Hardneck Garlic in 2nd week of Sept in my area, YMMV. So mine have been in the ground for a month now and most have broke through the ground and are a couple inches tall.

Now to answer your question:
While I always plant them "point up", I've never paid any attention to direction orientation. Attached is a photo from when I started my harvest last July. This section was Chesnok Red. You can see the leaves go in all different directions.
319069

[gwpercle]

Plant it root side down , fat end , and pointed - sprout side up .
No use making it hard on the sprout by planting it sprout side down ...
it will grow , usually but takes a little longer to get rightened out .
Gary

[elmacgyver0]

There must be a big vampire problem out there.

[DougGuy]

Plant it root side down , fat end , and pointed - sprout side up .
No use making it hard on the sprout by planting it sprout side down ...
it will grow , usually but takes a little longer to get rightened out .
Gary

Softneck can be planted in any orientation, it will just grow.

Hardneck NEEDS to be planted root down, pointed end up, which I have always observed, regardless the type of garlic.

The question I was asking is about the horizontal rotation of the clove, as John_B pointed out, the leaves of his garlic are oriented randomly, so that sorta answers my question as he planted the cloves with no special attention given as to how they were rotationally oriented.

I planted mine in two of the three tubs with the cloves oriented all in one direction, and I planted the third tub observing 90° orientation from one clove to the next.

We shall see when they grow, how the leaves follow the orientation of the clove. I couldn't find this anywhere on the net. Google has never grown garlic I guess.

[Polymath]

My brother has such a problem with bears and deer eating his garden that garlic is about the only thing he can grow.

The neighbor lady lost ALL her garlic one year to the Deer. Must have been Italian Deer. No really, they ate every single plant down to the dirt.

[10x]

There must be a big vampire problem out there.

No there isn't. Garlic is extremely effective against vampires.

Way back in the 1960s a local fellow had 2 very attractive daughters. When they got to the age where boys were asking them out on dates, he would make each of them swallow a whole clove of raw garlic on Friday morning and then again on Saturday morning. It worked well and kept the ladies from getting pregnant. You could not sit close to either of them in the movie theatre as they had a strong garlic odor. You could still smell garlic from them on monday morning at school
My mom's cure for a cold was a sandwich made from roasted home cured ham with shaved cloves of raw garlic mixed with mustard and mayo as a spread in the ham. She fed this to me on a Sunday night and on Monday the teacher drove me home from school before classes started. That added two days to the Easter break.

[elmacgyver0]

Perhaps I should have said, must have been, in the past tense.
As far as the young ladies, I guess garlic is a good substitute for moral teaching.
When I was a teenager, I tried my hand at making spaghetti sauce.
Growing up on a farm with a German background my mother didn't use garlic to my knowledge, at least she never had the raw stuff around the house.
Anyway, back to the spaghetti sauce, the recipe called for a clove of garlic, I bought one of the onion looking things and not knowing anything about cloves, I used the whole thing.
That sauce not only would keep vampires away, but everything else as well.
That was the last time I was allowed to make spaghetti sauce.

[10x]

Perhaps I should have said, must have been, in the past tense.
As far as the young ladies, I guess garlic is a good substitute for moral teaching.
When I was a teenager, I tried my hand at making spaghetti sauce.
Growing up on a farm with a German background my mother didn't use garlic to my knowledge, at least she never had the raw stuff around the house.
Anyway, back to the spaghetti sauce, the recipe called for a clove of garlic, I bought one of the onion looking things and not knowing anything about cloves, I used the whole thing.
That sauce not only would keep vampires away, but everything else as well.
That was the last time I was allowed to make spaghetti sauce.

A week's protection from the ladies,
Life time protection from vampires

[DougGuy]

I bought one of the onion looking things and not knowing anything about cloves, I used the whole thing.
That sauce not only would keep vampires away, but everything else as well.
That was the last time I was allowed to make spaghetti sauce.

That's funny!

I never tried making my own sauce from scratch until this year. There is a local eatery that had the BEST marinara, they served it with fried calamari so I patterned my sauce after the flavor profile of theirs, and I got dead on accurate so now we have jars of marinara, and I discovered that a slightly reduced ingredients recipe made awesome tomato soup so we got jars of soup too! Yea both recipes use a bunch of garlic and fresh basil.

[MaryB]

No such thing as to much garlic! If I made garlic bread with pasta my weekend off the guys in the shop all whined I ate garlic... There is a subset of people who sweat it out... and my job was physical so we did sweat!

[.429&H110]

New Hampshire, the garlic did very well with a chicken wire tent over it to keep the deer out.
The does were so hungry and tame, my kids could sit in lawn chairs quietly and pat them.
They were supposed to be scaring the deer, not feeding them. Let me tell ya about ticks.

If you can grow garlic, you can grow coneflowers as a perennial.
Coneflower root is echinacea, a very strange herbal, worth money.
Needs about three years to get a good root going.
The stuff worked for me.

[fiberoptik]

Doc said high cholesterol, needed meds, diet change, exercise. I’d heard garlic 🧄 helped. I started eating 3 cloves a day. Found them chewed up a bit intense but manageable. Month later cholesterol was down 100 points. Doc didn’t believe me when I said just 3 cloves a day kept doctor away.
I clipped a third of my thumb tip off with Chinese cleaver. VA doc thought I used a scalpel. Not enough to stitch. It got infected and antibiotics weren’t working. They started talking partial amputation! Called a homeopathic friend and explained the situation. She said to smash garlic 🧄 and onion 🧅, wait 5 minutes and use as a poultice. Change 2x daily. I put it in a sandwich bag, shoved in thumb. I also noticed something round and white in the center of wound. Sterilized a pair of hemostats, grabbed it and pulled it out. It healed up after that. Tip is kinda numb, and the skin grows over the tip with a void in that spot, but I can’t complain! Garlic 🧄 is good [emoji106]!

[Hogtamer]

No kitchen is complete without fresh garlic. I planted some myself last week as I use a couple of heads a week. 8-10 cloves tomorrow in boneless leg of lamb.

[dale2242]

I have planted my garlic outside of my garden fence.
I do have blacktail deer here.
They never bothered my garlic.

[augercreek]

I planted 120 cloves this week, 40 of Romanian Red,40 of German Ex. Hardy, and 40 of German White. Some of the Romanian Red cloves were as big as a golf ball ! We use pelletized chicken poop and fish emulsion for fertilizer. Soil prep is important as they like loose soil and drains well. I've been growing these varieties for three years now and they seem to produce the best for me here in the Duluth area. I eat at least a clove a day in one form or another. Haven't had a cold, flu, or covid in twenty some years! They are the best anti-viral medicine you can get.

[Dancing Bear]

I started planting mine Monday. Went to close up our trailer yesterday. Today I'll finish planting the rest of the garlic. About the right time for my zone. We do use a lot of garlic!

[DougGuy]

I planted on 10/17 and yesterday 10/29 a few in each of the 3 tubs were up 2" and today there are more coming up. 12 days not bad! Thankful for the Indian Summer we got the whole month of October!

It was mid 80s the last few days, ahh but all good things must end, tomorrow on halloween, we get the first real cold snap down into the 30s.