We love to share what we love... and we love garlic and shallots! You'll find gorgeous seed garlic & shallots listed here every late Summer/early Fall. And don't forget the fertility... our Organic Garlic and Shallot Fertilizer has specially blended diverse amendments to feed both our soil and our alliums, and in turn, us!
Transcript: Let’s talk about the soil you’re planting your garlic into. So friends here are the first things you need to know: fertile, well drained soil and full sun all day long. Ideally, the more the merrier. So let’s break that down. Fertility. Garlic is a heavy feeder, they need lots and lots of nutrients. There’s a direct relationship between the quantity of nutrients you give them and the quality and the quantity of the bulbs that you’ll be harvesting. So don’t be shy.
Here in the fall. We’re putting on compost we’ve amended it with with crab and lobster meal, alfalfa meal, there’s a lot of things that you can do to build up your soil in the fall that will make your garlic that much more beautiful for the year to come and incorporating as you till right before you plant that is the dream.
And, well drained soil is best you can have it doesn’t necessarily need to be Sandy and it doesn’t need to be dry by any means. But it just doesn’t need to be like the lowest point in your bed. If garlic gets too wet, it essentially will drown a little bit and it will not be able to uptake nutrients, it will have so much water. And so be sure that you choose a well drained location and full sun, the more sun it will have, the more energy will have from its leaves to make a bigger, more beautiful bulk. So yes, the color, the flavor, the size of the garlic that you harvest says everything about the location its growing in the fertility and the weather of your season. There are so many factors involved.
Here’s another little tip you want to till shortly before you plant it’s tempting. Even a month ago, we could have come in and built these beds, but at that point the soil would have settled and today instead of planting easily three, four inches down with our cloves, they would have been much more compacted and it would be hard to plant the garlic as deeply as possible. So it’s tricky because you want to be planting anytime between Halloween and Thanksgiving and making sure that you’re planting into nice light, airy freshly tilled soil is the dream not only for your hands, but for your garlic as well.
A few other things to keep in mind. You can totally follow tomatoes that you’ve just harvested. They aren’t. They aren’t abundant anymore. So you’ve put them on your compost, and anything else that you’ve grown all summer long, all of a sudden, they’re not they’re producing in your garden, you’ve taken them out. You can totally plant your garlic right there. We had cover crop in this field this summer, but you can totally follow carrots with garlic. Awesome. You just want to make sure that you’re not putting your garlic right where you are just growing other alliums, whether it’s onions, shallots, leeks, garlic from the year before, granted on a small scale, it’s not the end of the world. Diseases don’t build up and pass don’t build up in a small scale in the same way that way that they will run the largest scale but nonetheless it’s a really good year to plant garlic in the same place with only with three years in between if you can possibly manage it.
So there you have it friends but you want fertile, well drained and full sun soil before you plant and then plant your garlic.
