October in the South is a strange month in the garden. The tomatoes are finished, the okra has gone woody, and the beds look like they have given up. This is precisely the week to put something in the ground that will not ask much of you until spring.
Garlic goes in now. Not in March, when the garden centers finally stack the bulbs by the register, and not in summer, when nothing you plant will have time to size up. Planting garlic in the fall asks for one afternoon of work and then mostly leaves you alone until the dogwoods bloom.
Why Garlic Wants to Be Planted in Fall
Garlic is a bulb, and bulbs run on cold. A clove dropped into warm October soil spends the next few weeks pushing out roots and, in most years, a short green shoot that sits through the winter. That cold period — growers call it vernalization — is what tells the plant to divide into cloves instead of growing into one fat, undivided bulb.
Skip the cold and you get a handsome green plant that harvests as a single round knob with no cloves to separate come June. That is the whole reason fall planting matters more than almost anything else you will do with this crop.
There is a second, quieter advantage. Roots that establish in November keep working through mild Southern winters, so the plant enters spring with a head start. In the Lowcountry and the Gulf states the ground rarely freezes at all, and garlic grows slowly all winter.
Softneck or Hardneck? The Answer Depends on Where You Garden
Every garlic you can buy falls into two families, and the choice is less about taste than latitude.
Softneck garlic — the braidable kind, sold in supermarkets — carries a soft central stem, produces more bulbs per pound of seed, and stores for six months or more. It is more widely adapted and more forgiving of heavy soil. For most of the South, this is the right family.
Hardneck garlic sends up a stiff stalk and a curled flower stem called a scape. The flavors are more interesting, the cloves bigger and easier to peel, but the bulbs keep only three to six months and the plants want richer soil and colder winters. Growers place its comfort zone north of roughly latitude 37 — Virginia and upward — though Chesnok Red and German Extra Hardy have done well further south, especially in the mountains, where elevation buys back some of the cold.
If you garden in the upper South or the Carolina and Virginia mountains, grow a little of both. In the flat, zone 8b-and-warmer South, lean on softnecks and treat hardneck as an experiment.
Varieties worth asking for: Inchelium Red, an artichoke type with a long record across the South; Silver Rose for smooth white silverskin bulbs and long storage; Lorz Italian for big, lumpy artichoke bulbs; and the Creole group, which handles heat better than most.
One botanical aside, because it confuses people every fall: elephant garlic is not garlic at all. It is Allium ampeloprasum, a cousin of the leek.
Start With Seed Garlic, Not the Grocery Store
This is the one place where being thrifty costs you a season. Supermarket garlic is grown for the supermarket: varieties chosen for California and Mexican conditions, bulbs held in cold storage, and sometimes treated to keep them from sprouting on the shelf. The treatment that keeps a bulb quiet in a produce bin can keep it quiet in your garden too.
Buy from a seed garlic supplier, a local grower, or a farmers market stand selling bulbs specifically for planting. Order early; good varieties sell out by late September, and bulbs that arrive in December still plant fine but yield less.
Prepare the Bed Before You Need It
Garlic wants sun — at least six hours of it — and it wants drainage more than it wants richness. Wet winter feet are the most common way Southern garlic fails. In heavy red clay, that means a raised bed or a generous mound of compost worked into the top eight inches.
Aim for a soil pH between 6.0 and 7.0, and work compost in now rather than in February. Fall fertility gives the roots something to feed on through winter and lets the organic matter mellow before the plant starts growing in earnest. Garlic does not need a heavy hand with nitrogen; too much in spring produces a lot of leaf and small bulbs.
How to Plant a Clove
Break the bulb apart only when you are ready to plant — a day or two ahead at most. Each clove should still have its papery wrapper on; a bruised clove rots.
Find the flat, slightly rough plate on the bottom of the clove where it attached to the bulb. That side goes down, the pointed tip up. Set cloves about two inches deep in most Southern soils, three to four inches where winters bite harder, and six inches apart in the row, with a foot or more between rows if you plan to hoe.
If you are planting a lot, a dibber poked into soft ground is faster than digging individual holes. Drop the clove, cover it, move on. A hundred cloves is a pleasant afternoon and more garlic than most households eat in a year, so start smaller than you think you should.
Then mulch. Three to four inches of straw, pine straw, or shredded leaves holds soil temperature steady through the freeze-thaw cycles that heave unprotected cloves out of the ground, keeps winter weeds down, and holds moisture when spring turns dry. Pine straw is the South's great gift to gardeners, and this is the crop that shows it off. Water once if the ground is dry, then leave it; fall rain usually does the rest.
The Mild-Winter Problem
If you garden where winter soil stays above about 40 degrees — coastal South Carolina and Georgia, the Gulf Coast, much of Florida and south Louisiana — your garlic may not get the cold it needs, and the result is usually a small plant that never divides properly.
The workaround is unglamorous. Put your seed cloves in a paper bag in the refrigerator for six to eight weeks before planting, then plant them in the coldest part of your fall. Never freeze them, and keep them away from ripening fruit. Some growers in the mildest zones plant in December or early January after that chill instead of October.
Winter, Spring, and the Scape Question
Through winter there is little to do beyond pulling the occasional weed and checking that the mulch has not blown off. In late February and March, garlic leaves sometimes need help finding daylight; a hand clearing straw off the shoots is all it takes.
From March on, garlic does its real work. It does not compete with weeds well, so cultivate shallowly and often and keep the moisture even. One serious dry spell in April costs you bulb size you cannot recover.
Hardneck varieties send up a scape in late spring, curling through a full turn before it straightens out. Cut it off where it meets the top leaf, once it has uncoiled; each week it stays costs roughly five percent of your yield. The scapes are one of the best things to come out of a spring garden — chop and sauté them like green beans, with garlic's flavor built in. Ease off nitrogen once the bulbs begin to swell.
Harvest at the Right Moment
The most common mistake in growing garlic is waiting too long. You are not looking for a completely dead plant. You are looking for the lower third of the leaves to brown while several upper leaves are still green. That window lasts maybe a week.
Harvest in late May or June in the Deep South, June into early July further north. Loosen the soil with a digging fork, well away from the bulb, then lift. Never pull garlic by the stem; the neck breaks and you lose the bulb to rot.
Knock off the loose soil with your hand. Do not wash them, and do not trim the roots or the neck yet — those are what the bulb is still drawing on while it cures.
Curing Is Half the Crop
Garlic that goes straight from the garden into a kitchen drawer turns soft in a month. Curing is what makes it keep. Spread the bulbs in a single layer, or tie them in bundles of eight or ten and hang them, in a dry, shaded, well-ventilated place — a shed, a garage, a covered porch with good airflow. Not in the sun, which cooks the bulbs, and not in a damp basement.
Leave them four to six weeks, until the wrappers are papery and the neck is completely dry. Then trim the roots, cut the stem an inch above the bulb, and brush off the outer skin. Softnecks braid beautifully at this point; hardnecks are better trimmed and stored in a mesh bag or a shallow basket.
Set aside your biggest, best-shaped bulbs as next year's seed garlic, and store them separately so you are not tempted to eat them in January. Every clove you plant becomes one bulb, so the size of what you plant is the size of what you get.
One last piece of housekeeping: do not plant garlic, onions, or leeks in the same spot more than two years running. Soil-borne problems such as white rot persist for years, and a three- or four-year rotation is the cheapest insurance available. Small bulbs, meanwhile, usually trace back to shade, weeds, late planting, or a winter that never got cold enough.
None of this is fussy work. Planting garlic in the South is mostly a matter of getting it in the ground at the right time, keeping its feet dry, and then knowing exactly when to stop waiting and dig.
