Today was a gorgeous day! While walking around thinking of ideas for the garden, I discovered that our garlic had already sprouted. We have about five or six shoots showing already! We planted about sixty cloves back in November. We ran out of garlic before the fall last year. We'd like to be able to grow a whole year's supply so we increased how much we planted this time to see how long it would last.
Garlic is very easy to grow. We actually buy garlic from the grocery store and plant it. It worked very well for us last year and tasted amazing. All you need to do is divide your garlic bulb into individual cloves and plant them pointy side up in the ground. You should space the rows about six inches apart and each garlic bulb six inches apart. If you plant them closer then the bulbs will be smaller since they don't have much space to grow.
This year I was given some garlic seeds and garlic bulbs to plant from a friend who saves her seeds each year. She says the garlic is a Purple Italian variety that was given to her by one of her friends. Hopefully it comes up and does well. It will be my first experience with growing my own bulbs from seeds for the next year as well.
Most websites I've been to while reading about growing garlic say that garlic is temperamental and hard to grow. I've found the complete opposite was true in my yard anyway. All I do is plant it, cover it with about six inches of leaves and by spring they're shooting out all over the place. It's usually ready for harvest by July. Garlic also seems to last a fairly long time as well if you braid it and keep it dry. We'll see how long it will keep this year once we harvest.
