Unlike most garden vegetables, we plant garlic in the fall and harvest it in the summer. This might seem strange until you realize that it's a bulb like tulips and daffodils, so it does make sense to plant it in the fall.
Wait until the days become cool. Garlic likes cool, moist soil. Many gardeners have waited a bit too long and had to sweep snow away before planting, but still had success. Just the same, aim for a comfortable autumn week when it's pleasant to work outside, but not yet freezing at night.
Step 1: Choose good garlic bulbs
For planting, look for garlic bulbs that show no signs of disease: spots, bruises, soft areas, because you don't want to infect your next year's crop of garlic. If you do find anything odd-looking on the bulbs, it won't hurt to eat those, or you can compost them.
Get your planting garlic from a good seed vendor, or from a local grower. Large, healthy-looking bulbs from a local market are good for planting as well as eating, but avoid imported garlic because it might be a variety that doesn't grow well in Canada.
Step 2: Break apart the bulbs
When you peel and break apart a garlic bulb, you find several wedges, each with another hard skin. The wedges are called "cloves", and there are usually between 4 and 12 in a bulb, depending on the variety. Leave the skins on the cloves. You'd peel them before cooking, but they protect the cloves in the ground. Once again, inspect every clove for signs of disease: spots, bruises, soft areas. Eat or discard any that don't look really healthy.
Step 3: Prepare the soil
Your garlic will grow for up to 10 months in the same place, so it's best to start with well prepared soil. Garlic grows best in full sun, and with well-fertilized, moist, weed-free soil. You can keep moisture in, and weeds out, with mulch but now is the time to make sure you dig plenty of compost into your garlic patch.
You can plant garlic about every 6 inches in each direction, so calculate how many bulbs you'll want to harvest, and measure out enough space to plant that many cloves. Get all the weeds out, and loosen the soil at least 6 inches deep to make planting easy.
Step 4: Plant the cloves
Now it's time to plant. Every clove will grow into a full bulb by next summer. At a spacing of 6 inches apart, plant the cloves about four times as deep as they are long. E.g. if a clove is 1 inch from top to bottom, aim to plant it with the bottom about 4 inches underground. Smaller cloves will be a little less deep, larger cloves will be deeper.
You can use a trowel or a stick to make a hole, or if you've loosened the soil well you can just push the cloves under with your thumb. Notice which end is the top point, and which has the round plate (the roots grow from there). Try to plant with the pointed end up, but if you get it upside-down, the plant will twist around and grow correctly anyway - you might just find a twisty garlic bulb next year.
Step 5: Mulch!
Any kind of mulch will help cool the soil, conserve moisture and keep down weeds - three things that turn good garlic into great garlic! Straw, shredded newspapers, old fabric, wood chips, even scrap lumber, just about anything that covers the soil as along as it won't leave chemical residues behind.
Step 6: Do nothing for seven months
Garlic is so easy to grow.
Step 7: Look for scapes and moths
When the scapes - garlic flowers that is - grow, you can choose to remove them or let them grow. By removing them, you increase the size of the bulb underground because the plant puts all its growth there instead of dividing energy between the bulb and the scape. By leaving the scapes to mature, you'll get smaller bulbs, but a good harvest of bulbils -- See our article on how to grow garlic from bulbils.
Scapes are delicious. It's best to harvest just as they begin to uncurl, so they're still tender. Add them to any dish where you'd cook onion greens!
At the same time as scapes appear, you might find damaged spots on the garlic leaves. See our article on leek moths, a fairly easily preventable pest.
Step 8: Harvest in midsummer
In the middle of the summer, you should see the leaves turn yellow and start to die back. This is natural -daffodils and tulips do that too - it just means the bulbs are fully formed and the plant's job is done for now.
Loosen soil a few inches around the garlic stem with a shovel or fork, and gently pull the plants up. You should see beautiful bulbs at that bottoms. Let the plants dry in a ventilated place, ideally out of the rain, for a few days. Then cut the bulbs off leaving an inch of stem, and let the bulbs dry, or cure, for a few more days until they don't smell strongly.
Always store garlic in open containers so it can breathe, and at room temperature or slightly cool, not cold. Since you plant garlic in the fall, it will try to sprout anyplace cold, like a fridge. Room-temperature storage tells the bulbs to hibernate instead of sprout, so the counter or a kitchen cupboard are ideal places to keep them.
Step 9: Go back to Step 1
Your own harvested garlic is your own source of planting stock for the next year. Set aside as many bulbs as you need for replanting, choosing the best. Remember to count how many cloves you'll need, not just how many bulbs.
Enjoy your own permanent renewing supply of great garlic!