Raising garlic

Missed-Em 7/12/2021, 3:34 pm

My SIL recommended Music garlic as she has good luck with it. Is it best to start from seeds or bulbs? Looked it up in a couple of sources and seems pretty steep in price. If I read wright, one bulb(6 - 8 cloves) run $8 to $9. So for that I get maybe 6 cloves which result in potentially 48 bulbs. Is this right? Total newly on garlic.

OhioGardener 7/12/2021, 4:56 pm

Missed-Em wrote:My SIL recommended Music garlic as she has good luck with it. Is it best to start from seeds or bulbs? Looked it up in a couple of sources and seems pretty steep in price. If I read wright, one bulb(6 - 8 cloves) run $8 to $9. So for that I get maybe 6 cloves which result in potentially 48 bulbs. Is this right? Total newly on garlic.

Garlic is planted in the fall or early winter from cloves, not seeds. They are then harvested in June - July timeframe.

Not sure of your math - 6 cloves will produce 6 bulbs. Each of those 6 bulbs will produce 5 to 8 cloves, so you could get 30 to 48 cloves from the 6 cloves you planted.

Most on-line sales that I have dealt with charge from $6 to $10 per bulb. If you have never grown garlic, suggest you simply pick up a few bulbs from your local farmer's market or grocery store (if you have an organic grocery store, all the better). Plant those cloves with the pointed end up, and learn from the experience of growing your first garlic.

Mary Lee 7/13/2021, 8:21 am

I planted garlic for the first time last fall and was so thrilled to see it coming up in the spring. We had to leave for 6 weeks May-June and when I came home I found the garlic looking pretty rough (even though we had someone to water it) I cut the scapes off and left it maturing for a week. Then decided to pull it. Alas it had what must have been beautiful bulbs but were now rotting.
My question is, what happened? Too much water? Not enough water? Bugs? - though I didn't notice any creatures eating/crawling on it. Could use some advice please.

**Scorpio Rising** 7/13/2021, 12:57 pm

Hi Mary,

I cut the scapes as soon as they appear and curl around. Not all at once usually. The scape will redirect the plant to form seeds, not bulbs. I have a feeling that’s what happened maybe. How many of the lower leaves were brown? Once the scape is removed, about another month goes by and the bottom leaves start turning brown. Once about 4 or 5 of them are dry, then it’s time to harvest.

I have left garlic too long, and the heads kind of fall apart into cloves. Is that what happened? When did you plant? I plant after Halloween.

Mary Lee 7/13/2021, 2:37 pm

Hi Scorpio Rising,
My gut feeling for my garlic failure is that it grew well, we had a drought, then rained and it matured and then rotted. The scapes were not seeding and the leaves were browned.
I'll plant some more in late Fall and hope for better luck next year! Wink

**Scorpio Rising** 7/13/2021, 3:21 pm

Yeah, that will do it! Darn it! Next year…

Missed-Em 7/14/2021, 11:23 am

Good info here, thanks --

karynne 7/28/2021, 10:54 pm

I bought some beautiful music garlic heads, so large, there were about 3-4 per bulb and a wonderful pinkish red

Planted them in the fall, harvested them last week, they are small some are ok but none like the ones I planted.

OTOH I do have enough garlic to last a long time if I can store it properly

heard you were supposed to feed them, I never did pale

**Scorpio Rising** 7/29/2021, 7:30 pm

karynne wrote:I bought some beautiful music garlic heads, so large, there were about 3-4 per bulb and a wonderful pinkish red

Planted them in the fall, harvested them last week, they are small some are ok but none like the ones I planted.

OTOH I do have enough garlic to last a long time if I can store it properly

heard you were supposed to feed them, I never did

So garlic is no different than any other SFG crop. Because it (SFG) is so intensively planted, we have to refresh each square between crops. Same for garlic.

Are you in an SFG? If so, a scoop full of decent compost needs to be amended into the square before planting anything else in there…

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