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: Every spring, I get lots of emails and phone calls people who want to ask, “When can I plant garlic? It’s time to plant garlic. Right? Right now it’s spring, can I plant garlic?” And the answer is no friends. If you don’t plant garlic in the fall, you really miss the boat. And it’s not worth planting until the following fall. And here’s why.
So garlic is this wild thing. It’s been cultivated for 6000 years, and its center of origin is around Kazakhstan, and really pretty cold places. And its strategy for surviving and multiplying in the world, is to make sure that it survives the cold, and not only survives, but it can divide. And so the craziest thing is about to happen to this beautiful bulb of Chesnok Red. I’m going to divide it into individual cloves plant the individual cloves, and this one individual clove will turn ultimately into a bulb, right. But here’s the magic. It’s that winter cold, that piercing splitting cold that drives that growth point of the garlic so deeply inside itself. And it’s protecting itself so closely. And part of that protection is that it’s actually dividing so that if one part of it doesn’t survive, another of it can. And generally it all survives, because it’s been doing this for millions of years. And from that little bit of survival that splits apart into all these other bits of survival, all of those cloves will grow. And so that individual clove will essentially in the middle of winter, split into many cloves, and then regrow in the spring as the full fold.
So what is that vernalization period, and vernalization is you know, the vernal season is the winter season. What is that? What are the temperatures and conditions that garlic needs to experience to feel like it’s gone through winter. Basically, it needs two months with the temperatures below consistently 40 and 50 degrees, so you can grow garlic pretty far south. But my friends in the Dominican Republic, they love garlic. And here’s their strategy. They literally take bulbs of garlic, and they put them in refrigerators for three months. 10-12 weeks at the very least. And after they’ve held them in the refrigerator for 10-12 weeks, then they’ll plant them out again. So they trick the garlic into thinking that it’s gone through a winter, which you totally can do, but if you live above the Mason Dixon line, it’s easy. Just throw it in the ground. So next time you’re thinking why is my life so hard and I can’t grow mangoes. Think well that’s okay. Because then I couldn’t grow garlic. And now you know.
