How to grow garlic

This decides most of what follows, and like determinate and indeterminate tomatoes it is frequently missing from the label.

Hardneck garlic sends up a stiff central flower stem — the scape — and forms a single ring of large, easily peeled cloves around it. It is markedly hardier, it has far more flavour range between varieties, and it does not keep as long: four to six months is typical. Because of that stiff stem it cannot be braided. In a cold-winter garden, hardneck is usually the right answer.

Softneck garlic makes no scape, packs more and smaller cloves in several layers, keeps far longer — often nine months or more — and has the flexible neck that makes braiding possible. It is what supermarkets sell, because it stores and ships. It prefers milder winters.

In the maritime Northwest both work, and the sensible move is to plant some of each: hardneck for eating well from summer to winter, softneck for the bulbs that carry you to the following spring.

There is also elephant garlic, which is not garlic at all — it is a leek that forms a huge mild bulb. Burr already knew this and lists it separately as Great-headed Garlic, identifying it as a different species.

This is the one instruction that reliably decides a garlic crop, and it is the one most often ignored because the alternative is standing in a kitchen holding perfectly good-looking garlic.

Two problems. Supermarket bulbs are frequently treated to suppress sprouting, so they sit in the ground and do nothing. And they are grown for warm climates and long shipping — much of it from China or California — so even when they do grow they are poorly adapted to a cold wet winter.

The larger issue is disease. Garlic is propagated clonally, so every disease its parent carried travels with the clove: white rot, nematodes, viruses. Supermarket stock carries no assurance about any of it, and white rot in particular stays in your soil for many years. It is a genuinely bad trade for the price of a bulb of seed garlic.

Buy proper seed garlic once, from a grower in a climate like yours, and then save your own. That is the whole point of a clonal crop: after the first purchase it is free forever, and it adapts to your ground over the years.

Choose the fattest bulbs and plant only the largest cloves from each. Bulb size compounds — big cloves make big bulbs, whose big cloves make bigger bulbs — and the small inner ones are for the kitchen.

Plant about a month before your first autumn frost. Our calendar counts that from your own frost dates rather than naming a month, which matters more for this crop than most — the aim is enough time to root before the ground goes cold, and not so much that it makes soft top growth that winter will burn.

Break the heads into cloves at planting time and not before. A broken clove starts losing moisture immediately, and cloves split weeks early perform noticeably worse. Leave the papery skin on each one.

Plant each clove pointed end up, flat basal plate down, about two inches deep and six inches apart in rows a foot apart. Planting upside down is the classic first-year mistake: the shoot has to turn itself around underground, which costs it weeks and often produces a bent, undersized bulb.

Then mulch. A few inches of straw over the bed moderates the freeze-thaw cycling that heaves cloves out of the ground, suppresses the weeds garlic competes with badly, and holds moisture in spring. In a wet maritime winter, make sure the bed drains — garlic tolerates cold far better than it tolerates sitting in water.

The 1912 manual gives it two sentences and gets the essentials right: garlic is planted by setting the small bulbs, or cloves, either in the autumn or early spring, and the culture is practically the same as for the onion.

In early summer, hardneck garlic throws a stiff flower stem from the centre of the plant which curls into a loop or two before straightening — the scapes in the photograph at the top of this page.

Cut them off. A plant left to flower diverts a real share of its energy into a seed head that will mostly not produce viable seed anyway, and bulbs are meaningfully smaller for it. Cut once the curl has formed and before the stem straightens and toughens.

The reward is immediate and is the reason this is the least resented job in the garden: scapes are excellent eating. Mild, green, somewhere between garlic and asparagus — grill them, or blitz them into a pesto that freezes well.

Softneck garlic makes no scape, so if yours never does, that is not a failure. It is a softneck.

One exception worth knowing: leaving a few scapes to mature gives you bulbils, the tiny aerial cloves in the head. They take two or three seasons to reach eating size, but they are an easy way to multiply stock and they are usually free of the soil-borne diseases that travel in cloves.

This is where a good garlic crop is most often spoiled, because the plant gives an ambiguous signal and both errors are costly.

Lift when roughly the bottom third to half of the leaves have gone brown and the upper ones are still green. Every leaf corresponds to a wrapper layer around the bulb, so waiting for the whole plant to die back means the wrappers have rotted away — the bulb splits open, the cloves separate, and it will not store. Digging too early gives you an undersized bulb that never firms up.

Dig, do not pull; the stems break off surprisingly easily and a bulb left in the ground is a bulb you will not find again.

Then cure. Hang the whole plants, or lay them on racks, somewhere dry, shaded and airy for two to four weeks — not in the sun, which scalds them. They are cured when the neck is dry all the way through and the outer skins rustle.

Only then trim: roots off, stems cut to an inch or so, or leave softneck stems on to braid. Store cool, dark and dry with air movement, and never in the fridge, where the cold prompts them to sprout.

Save your biggest bulbs for replanting before you start eating the crop. It is much easier to set them aside now than to resist them in October.

No vegetable in our 1863 census has reversed so completely, and the evidence needs handling carefully because it is easy to overstate.

Two named varieties is what Fearing Burr gives garlic — the fewest of any crop we have counted, in a book that runs to seventy-one peas. That much is his own, and it is a fact about what an American seedsman thought worth describing.

For the reason, he quotes somebody else. “It is not cultivated to any considerable extent in this country; its strong flavor, and the offensive odor it communicates to the breath, causing it to be sparingly used in our cookery.” That sentence is Burr quoting M'Intosh — a British horticultural writer — so “this country” is Britain, not America. Anyone using this quote to say Americans would not eat garlic, ourselves included on an earlier draft of this page, has read it too quickly.

What can be said is narrower and still striking: an American cataloguer, describing garlic for American gardeners, reached for a British authority's dismissal of it and let it stand. He did not contradict it, and he did not have many varieties to set against it.

The rest is a twentieth-century story with a great deal of Italian, Chinese and Mexican cooking behind it. The plant did not change — garlic is propagated clonally, so in a real sense these are the same individuals — but what people were willing to smell of did.

One more difference worth noticing while you are here. Burr has garlic planted in April or May, and modern practice plants it in autumn for bigger bulbs. Both work. The autumn habit is the improvement, and it is recent enough that a good 1863 catalogue does not mention it.