Growing Garlic

I like to buy local food: local meats, local produce, local milk ... you get the picture.

When we moved to PEI, we bought as much as we possibly could from local producers. One exception was garlic. Local garlic was selling for $2.50 per bulb. I never buy Chinese garlic, but settle on Californian garlic that is readily available in local grocery stores which typically sells for about $1 per bulb.  I would pay up to $1.50 for local garlic but I find it hard to stomach the $2.50 for 1 bulb given the 4 bulb weekly average we consume as a household.

When I complained to a colleague, she informed me that the reason local garlic was so expensive here was that garlic is really hard to grow on PEI. Oh, I thought, that explains it. I walked away from that conversation scratching my head. Something just didn't sit right with me. Hmmmm, I wondered, is it really difficult to grow garlic on PEI?

Garlic -- May 2013

People turn to gardening for a variety of reasons: freshness, quality, passion, doing-it-yourself, savings. In my case, I decided to try my hand at growing garlic in the hopes of having a fresh, local, quality product that could eventually save my family $520 per year and demystify garlic growing.

Surely, it couldn't be all that hard. I knew that garlic had to be planted in the fall and harvested the following summer so, in October of 2010, I went to the store and picked up two bulbs of California garlic. I opened the garlic bulbs into cloves and walked over to the garden area. I planted them two inches down with the root tip at the bottom, covered them with the soil, watered them a bit, and walked away.

The next spring, garlic started poking its way from the soil. This was very exciting and so far, I hadn't done anything special in terms of work. I just dropped them in the soil.

By around mid July, the garlic scapes were twisting like pig tails. A friend had said when that happens, I should cut the scape off just below the twisting pig tail and this would allow the energy of the plant to focus on bulb production. So, I did. From those scapes, I produced a wonderful garlic scape paste, which I put on pizza. But you could use it the same way you would normally use garlic cloves.

I can't remember exactly when it happened, probably mid August, the garlic appeared to be dried up. So, I pulled them from the ground. From those two bulbs the previous fall, I harvested 10 bulbs!!! We ate a few bulbs, and I planted the rest back to the soil. In the fall of 2012, if I recall correctly, I harvested about 24 bulbs. We ate a couple and I put the rest back into the soil. This August, I am set to harvest about 80 bulbs!!! I'll plant most back into the soil and by the summer of 2014, I should be able to harvest approximately 200 bulbs. At that point, I'll have enough garlic to feed our garlic addiction throughout the year and plant enough for the following year.

Last fall, I thought I would try something different. I noticed that bugs left the garlic plants alone.  After having read about companion planting, I decided to plant the garlic around our fruit trees (apples and cherries) in the hopes of keeping the pests off of the trees. I also decided to add some quality compost to the process as the trees need the rich soil.

Garlic Growing Around Cherry Tree -- May 2013

The garlic is doing great and the trees seem to be doing better than last year with fewer pests on them. So, you see, growing garlic is very difficult and growing garlic on PEI is especially difficult! LOL. One of the best things about growing garlic is that it's not sensitive to frost. We have had a few good frosts this May after the spring thaw but the garlic doesn't care. It just keeps on growing.

Garlic Growing Around Apple Tree -- June 2013