How do you get your garlic to keep through the winter?
It gets buried under how ever many feet of snow we get and when the snow melts, it just keeps growing.
I plant it earlier than they recommend. The suggested planting time is early October, but I plant mine in mid-Sept.
I have several varieties but the one I like the best has very large cloves and the plants stand about 4 ft right now. They’re doing beautifully this year.
Some of the other varieties did not do well.
The first garlic I got was from a community garden but I *THINK* this is the variety......
http://www.territorialseed.com/product/Premium_Northern_White_Garlic/hardneck_garlic
I like it because the cloves are so big. Instead of peeling 3-4 little cloves, all you need to peel is one big one. It produces bulbs that have 4-6 large cloves, usually 5.
I save some out every year for next years crop and replant the biggest and best bulbs.
And far as I’ve seen, NOTHING bothers it. The biggest danger is that something might happen to flatten the garlic. One year I had some critter plow through the garlic and some of the plants bent over at the soil line and that was it for them. Other than that, I don’t know that they are susceptible to much of anything.
Also, I plant it in rows and lay down a strip of landscape fabric between the rows and cover it with straw. Keeps the weeding WAY down, making the garlic crop a virtually maintenance free crop.
You can also harvest the flower spikes, called scapes, before the flowers open up, and eat them. It’s suggested that you cut them off anyway so the plant puts the energy into the bulb instead of seed production. It’s supposed to result in bigger bulbs.