Here are our best tips for how to plant garlic cloves in your vegetable garden!

Garlic is one of the easiest vegetables to grow in your garden or in containers. And it is wonderful to use in all kinds of cooking recipes, plus it’s also very healthy for us. 

Garlic doesn’t take up much room at all so you can either plant a bed of garlic cloves in a corner of your garden or tuck a dozen garlic plants in a pot and keep it on your deck.

You can see we love to grow and harvest garlic! And because we live in a northern climate (Zone 3 Canada) we only grow a type of garlic called hardneck.

Hardneck garlic is a garlic variety that loves a cold winter; if you are in warm winter areas, grow softneck garlic instead, as softneck varieties are better in warmer climates.

How to Plant Garlic in the Fall

In our climate (cold winters) we plant our Garlic in the early Fall anywhere from around mid-September through to the middle of October. If you live in the South you plant in the early Spring.

Generally, you’ll want to avoid planting garlic where other garlic, onion, or any other member of the allium family has been planted recently.

This also includes plants like leeks, scallions, shallots, and chives. Rotating where garlic or other related plants are grown can help avoid allium pests or diseases.

Keep reading to see just how easy Garlic is to grow and then make sure you plant a few cloves!

How to Grow Garlic in a Raised Bed

We plant garlic in our vegetable garden beds or in raised beds next door where we have lots of room. Add some good quality compost or well aged manure, blood meal, or fertilizer and dig it in well.

Rake the soil smooth and get ready for planting garlic cloves.

Planting Garlic Cloves

Here’s our Garlic Bed, ready for planting. We plant Garlic close together – you can see I have 4 beds separated by narrow walkways.

I take my box of keeper cloves (here’s how we decide which cloves to eat and which garlic cloves to use for planting) down to the garden.

I plant the garlic cloves about 6 inches apart, with 8 inches between the rows. This ensures the garlic will get enough direct sunlight. Then, I push each of the cloves about 3 inches of depth below the soil surface.

 You can see the individual cloves in the picture above because I like to try and get the rows nice and straight, so I don’t push them down to seat them and put the soil on top of them until I am finished planting them all. I use the planted ones as markers for the rest of the cloves.

I was able to plant 288 cloves in that space! You can see it doesn’t take a lot of room to grow enough garlic for your family for the winter months.

Our 288 cloves is a LOT of garlic, but we love roasted garlic and we often have 2 whole heads of garlic between us at dinner time.

We also love making Bacon Wrapped Garlic Bites – so yummy as an appetizer!

If you cook the garlic, it is a lot milder than if you eat it raw and it’s so healthy for you! Lots of nutrients and flavor emerge when cooking.

How to Plant Garlic in Pots

If you don’t have room for a vegetable garden, you can easily plant garlic in pots, containers or grow bags. Grow some on your patio or balcony – just follow the same premise as for planting in a garden.

Plant your garlic six inches apart in good quality soil. These long rectangular flower pots work really well for growing garlic in a smaller space.

Since garlic doesn’t grow very deep, these pots are an ideal size.

How to Grow Garlic in a Flower Bed

Garlic plants are quite pretty and look nice when they are mixed in with perennial or annual flowers. If you’ve got a few empty spaces in your flower bed, plant some sprouting garlic cloves there!

Tuck three or four alongside any of your flowers or shrubs – they take hardly any room at all and will be easy to find when it’s time for harvesting garlic bulbs.

How to Protect Garlic Cloves for Winter

It is a good idea to find a way to protect the garlic cloves for the winter months. Garlic is very hardy but if winter temperatures stay below zero, they really do need something to insulate them from the cold. 

How to Mulch Garlic

Mulch the whole bed with straw once the temperatures get down around freezing. Our temperatures are cold on Fall mornings and maybe close to freezing overnight.

We do not mulch right after planting. Wait until the temperatures go down; if you mulch too early the bed could be warmer than the garlic likes it.

Sometimes here, our garlic gets planted three weeks before we go out and cover with mulch.

I loosely add about three inches of straw on top of the bed. I don’t tamp it down at all; the rain and snow that is coming will do that. 

Once planted, all you have to do is weed it regularly during the growing season. One of the reasons I plant my Garlic tightly is that it reduces the weeds that come up.

So to get the Garlic in the ground and ready for Winter, it is just a matter of planting the cloves, covering them with soil, then covering them with a good layer of mulch later. You could use hay, straw, grass clippings or leaves.

During the Fall, your Garlic may start to grow and get a few inches of green leaf on them before Winter sets in. It’s OK…you don’t need to do anything to them – just wait for them to appear in Spring.

In the Spring, you may need to remove some of the mulch, especially if you see garlic trying to poke through but not being able to.

If you see any yellow foliage, this is a good sign that the garlic needs more light.

Spring Growth for Garlic

In the Spring the Garlic bulbs will continue to grow. While the green leaves are growing above the soil, the Garlic bulb is growing below the soil. Water it every few days and keep any weeds out.

In early summer (think June and early July), you will see the Garlic Scape forming and coming out from the center of the growing stalk. Every Garlic plant will send out one Scape.

As they grow, they start to curl and they look great on the dinner plate cooked whole. Can you see the Scapes?

Before you know it, you’ll have lots of green shoots to harvest – just cut them off at the base of the Scape using a knife. I usually just snap them off, it’s much faster.

If you want nice big garlic heads, you MUST take the scapes off. This directs the energy into the bulb below ground, and it will then grow bigger.

Don’t just toss those Scapes onto your compost pile. They taste great!

How to Store Fresh Garlic

For garlic storage, you’ll want to find a place where the room temperature is on the cooler side and there’s good air circulation.

If you store garlic in the refrigerator, it may start to sprout in a couple of days.

Here are several different ways to preserve garlic in oil – including how to freeze garlic.

Now you know how to plant garlic cloves in the garden – plant some this Fall!

Garlic is very easy to grow and hardly takes any room at all. Every garden should have some garlic growing in it!

Freshly dug Garlic tastes nothing like the store bought Garlic you see in the produce section at the supermarket.

You can find good healthy Garlic by buying some at your local Farmer’s Market – ask if it was grown locally.

Just remember you need 1 clove per plant, so buy accordingly. There are roughly 6 – 8 cloves on one head of garlic. You can also buy hardneck garlic bulbs here online.

More Garlic Posts

• Part 2 of the Garlic series is called “How to Make Pickled Garlic Scapes” 
• Here’s how you can store garlic in olive oil – plus more ways to store garlic bulbs.
• Wondering how to roast a garlic bulb? Find out here
• This Feta Cheese Garlic Spread is a family favourite!

Published 2012, updated July 2022

Here’s the third part of our Growing Garlic series. Part 1 is an overview of growing Garlic. Part 2 covers harvesting the garlic scapes – which we turn into Pickled Garlic Scapes. Now we’re moving on to how to harvest and cure Garlic.

Your Garlic has now been growing all spring and summer. You’ve removed the Garlic Scape that is on each plant.

Right about now, you are probably quite curious as to when to get your garlic out of the ground. You want to see how big those bulbs are!

How to Harvest and Cure Garlic

How to Harvest Garlic

When the leaves of the Garlic are yellowing, it is time for harvesting. In the Cariboo which is Zone 3, that is usually the beginning of September.

As a sidenote:  Our garlic often gets yellowing tops early in the growing year.

This is because we often have very cool nighttime temperatures, so the garlic tops get a touch of frost early in the season. Your garlic tops may well be green all season long. 

We do not find that the yellowing tops affect the taste of the garlic at all. It’s just something that happens here because of those very cool temperatures.

Dig up a couple of plants, preferably from different parts of the garlic bed. Have the cloves formed? It’s time – you can dig up your plants.

It’s always better to harvest your garlic a bit early, rather than a bit late. You can tell if you harvested late if the cloves have started to pull away from the center stem.

You want to harvest when the cloves are still tight with a wrapper on them. This is the best stage for storing the longest.

You may find that there is dirt stuck in the roots, especially if your soil is moist. I rub the root end with my gloved hand and if the soil is a bit dry, it will crumble and fall out.

But if the soil is still quite wet, leave your garlic out in the air for an hour and let them dry a bit. This will make it easier to get the dirt out.

Try to NOT leave your garlic laying in the sun. You are better off to move it into a shaded area, even if there is still dirt on the roots.

How to Cure Garlic

If the weather is supposed to stay warm, you can hang the bulbs outside (out of the weather). We hang them up in the breezeway down at the barn.

If your weather is supposed to be quite cool or even frosty, bring your Garlic inside instead or hang it where it will not get hit with frost.  I use to bundle the plants with baling twine. 

I’ve moved on to a heavier twine since then, as bundles with huge bulbs can actually be quite heavy. When I bundle them, I put all the largest bulbs together.

I may end up with 8 bundles of nice big heads and 4 bundles of smaller heads. That’s a lot of Garlic! I bundle them like this because it is faster.

Also, it’s easier for me to pick next year’s cloves (another post). I hang them in groups of 10, as I sell some and this makes it much easier to count up.

If you stab a Garlic head with the shovel when harvesting, be sure to place those ones of to the side. Use them up first.

Garlic that has been cut or scraped will NOT store well, and could introduce bacteria to other bulbs. Just keep those in the kitchen and start cooking!

After the bundles have hung for at least 10 days (maybe closer to 2 weeks), bring them into the house.

We keep our Garlic downstairs, hanging the bundles in my potting room. Or, you can trim off the stalks using your garden shears.

Be sure to leave a 1 inch stem above the bulb. Then, cut the roots close to the base using some good kitchen scissors . Store the garlic bulbs in an open weave basket.

We don’t keep the Garlic in the Cold Room, as Garlic likes it a bit warmer than the 32 – 40 F temperature we keep the room at. 

When first hung, the aroma of Garlic fills the house –  what a wonderful smell.

Preparing a Garlic Bed for Planting

As soon as the Garlic is harvested and hung, we weed out the Garlic bed. It will only be a few weeks before this bed is planted again.

The earlier the bed is prepared, the better. If another layer of compost is needed, now is the time to add it. If we have time before planting, we will seed some Buckwheat in the bed to improve the soil for the coming year.

Buckwheat only takes about 5 weeks to grow and flower; this makes Buckwheat a fantastic soil builder. 

Now that you know how to harvest and cure garlic, let’s move on to replanting. I’ll show you how I choose which Garlic bulbs to replant for the following year. 

Here is the last installment  –  Growing Garlic – Part 4 (how to know which cloves to replant)

How to choose the best garlic cloves for planting – just follow these tips!

Here’s the fourth (and last) installment in the How to Plant Garlic series and this part focuses on how to choose the best garlic cloves for planting. The first article can be found here; Part 2 here; Part 3 here.

Here in Canada, we plant garlic (Allium sativum) in the Fall before the ground freezes. This allows the garlic cloves to settle in and even grow a few roots. Then when the cold weather comes, the cloves go dormant for the winter, then begin to grow early in the Spring.

Choosing the best cloves for planting goes a long way in growing large garlic bulbs! Here is information on hardneck garlic, plus sorting garlic bulbs and choosing cloves for replanting.

What are the Best Garlic Cloves for Planting?

There are two types of garlic that can be used for planting – hardneck garlic and softneck garlic. Here in Canada, we grow the hardneck varieties of garlic, because they do well with a cold period, meaning a cold winter.

Garlic Varieties:

Softneck varieties, such as Silverskins, grow well in southern climates, where they do much better than the hardneck type. The softneck type of garlic is not covered here, as we cannot grow that here.

Hardneck types that grow well in Canada and northern USA include:

• Purple Stripe
• Rocambole
• Porcelains – Yugoslavian and Music
• Chesnok Red
• Fish Lake
• Tibetan

Elephant garlic is actually not a type of garlic at all; it is one of the varieties of leeks!

Curing Garlic

Read through the prior installments (see above) that will explain everything about harvesting and curing garlic. 

We begin sorting the best looking garlic bulbs when hanging them for curing. The nice big bulbs get hung together, while the smaller bulbs get hung together. These smaller bulbs will be eaten over the Winter (Spring & Summer too, because I plant so many heads).

The nice big bulbs are the ones set aside for seed for next years garlic harvest. We usually hang my garlic bulbs in groups of 10 using nylon rope. This makes for easier counting of the bundles and finding the total number of bulbs we brought to harvest. A looped rope goes around the stalk, tying up the leaves and stem. 

It’s important to plant the largest, nicest looking cloves, if you are trying to improve your garlic harvests.

Since we sell some bulbs, it’s in our best interest to ensure that as many of the bulbs as possible are big and beautiful! If you plant small, misshapen cloves you will get garlic heads full of small misshapen cloves.

It’s logical – if you are always trying to improve your harvests (and you are, aren’t you?) then always use your biggest and best. That way, you will get more of those biggest and best heads!

Choosing the Best Garlic Cloves for Planting

Once the garlic is cured, the stalks are cut from the bulbs, the roots are trimmed with garden shears and the bulbs are put into boxes. At this point, you can either start splitting the heads or just set the box aside for a couple of weeks. You will find it is easier to split the bulbs into cloves if the bulbs are drier.

Breaking Open Garlic Bulbs into Cloves

When you are ready to start busting the bulbs open, grab a couple of empty boxes and get started. Carefully open up all the heads and separate the individual cloves.

Put the nice big garlic cloves in one box – these are the bulbs that will be replanted in the garden. (The planting will take place around late September, in order for us to have lots of fresh Garlic next August.)

Smaller cloves go in another box for storage over the winter. These will end up in our kitchen where they will get roasted in the oven or put in tin foil on the barbecue.

I’ll use them when I make Bacon Garlic Bites or add them to my jars of Homemade Pickled Asparagus. Look at these beautiful garlic cloves – these are the ones that will be replanted for harvesting garlic next year.

You can get a good idea of the clove size in the photo above. That’s a standard sized tape measure – those cloves are quite large.

Ready for replanting? Head over to Growing Garlic Part 1, for all the planting information you need. Information in that post includes:

• planting depth for each individual clove
• fertilizing with blood meal
• side-dress cloves with well composted manure and compost to add nitrogen to the soil
• mulching with straw to keep weeds from growing
• cutting off the flowering stalks of each garlic plant (here this happens in late June or early July)

Garlic Questions 

Is Store Bought Garlic Good for Planting?

It depends! Often, garlic bulbs bought at the grocery store have been sprayed with chemicals. It is very important to buy organic garlic bulbs from a reputable nursery. You can also find organic unsprayed bulbs at the farmers market.

Be sure to ask if the plants have been sprayed with chemicals. Organic sprays such as fish fertilizer is fine; this is a chemical free spray that helps with bulb growth.

What Type of Garlic is the Healthiest?

Any variety of garlic that is organically grown is a healthy garlic! Tip: You may find grocery store garlic has all of its roots shaved off. If the base of the bulb is completely root free and clean, it can be assumed that those bulbs have been sprayed.

The reason for the shaved base is that countries do not allow garlic to be imported with roots, as there is a greater chance of dirt coming in on those roots. This dirt may possible contaminate the soil in which they will now be planted.

What is the Difference Between Seed Garlic and Eating Garlic?

There is no difference between seed and eating garlic. Usually, smaller bulbs and cloves are used for eating and the larger cloves are reserved for replanting.

What Month is Best to Plant Garlic?

The ideal time for planting garlic depends on the climate where you live. Here in Zone 3 (Canada) we plant garlic in late September or early October. We always aim to have garlic planted before the middle of October.

It is best if the cloves are planted early enough that they can form some root growth, but not too early so that the leaves start growing tall.

If the weather is unusual and top growth begins, your plants will still be fine. Just cover them with mulch once the cold weather starts.

How Do You Grow Garlic for Beginners?

This information can be found in Part 1 of this series – then continue reading the different articles in the series to get all the information, right from growing through harvesting and curing.

I hope these posts all about growing garlic are a help to you. Garlic is easy to grow and takes up hardly any room at all. Even if you live in an apartment, you can easily plant 20 or 30 heads of garlic in a few pots or growing bags, so do it!

Backyard garlic growers love the strong fresh flavor of homegrown garlic! Plus, garlic is a very powerful natural antibiotic as well as an antioxidant.

Have you learned more about growing garlic from this series of posts? Feel free to share this article!

How to Grow Garlic Articles:

How to Plant Garlic – garlic bed preparation, spacing and garlic planting information

What to do with Garlic Scapes – and why you really do need to remove them

How to Harvest and Cure Garlic – from digging to hanging garlic for curing.

Find your best garlic cloves for planting – then get them in the soil this Fall for bulbs next August.

Want to find out which are The 5 Easiest Vegetables to Grow?

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originally published October 2019; latest update January, 2023