Knowing when to plant garlic in Maine is tricky. Here’s what I did.

Homestead
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Planting garlic is one of my favorite fall activities, but figuring out when to do it this year has been a little stressful.

The seed cloves need time to set roots before the ground freezes, but not so much time that they sprout up and are hurt by cold temperatures.

The general wisdom is to plant after a first light frost or two but before the ground freezes. In Maine, that’s between mid-September and early November. Where I live, this made Monday the perfect morning: just above freezing, with a howling wind around my ears when I set out with my shovel.

But next week it’s predicted to get up to 70 degrees, and hover in the 40s after that, and then who’s to say? In the end, I decided to wait for the conventional time and stagger out my planting beyond that by a few weeks.

You never know whether you did things right until harvest time. But plants are tenacious, and in that way sometimes forgiving, so I remembered the basics and hoped for the best.

I chose two hardneck varieties of seed garlic, which grow well in cold climates, from a local garden center. Chesnok Red is sweeter and good for roasting, and German Extra Hardy is a reliable standby.

I’d prepared some cloves by breaking up bulbs the day before, leaving the papery skins on. I slowly pushed on the top-middle of the bulb until it separated, removed the cloves, pulled the stalk out and broke apart the remaining cloves.

I’m sowing section by section as time allows. This is mostly because I’m reclaiming an old overgrown flower bed and, frankly, that takes forever; I’m hoping this schedule also insures me against complete garlic failure.

I started out breaking up matted roots with a shovel until I got to bare dirt.

My goal is to build up beds of soil that I don’t have to plow or shovel into. Very simply put, the less you disrupt soil by plowing, the more structure it has and organic matter it can hold, which is more hospitable for plants. This “no-till” method has produced the healthiest crops I’ve seen, and over time it’s less labor-intensive (plus, no machinery!).

Even for no-till farming, the ground typically needs to be broken up pretty deeply before you establish a bed, like I did with my shovel.

Garlic likes good drainage, so I loosened the bed with a small hand cultivator, which has bent metal “fingers” for hacking at stuff. At this point I lost an hour removing rock after rock (wouldn’t be a Maine garden without them!). If I left them in, they could get in the way of the developing bulbs.

I’m dealing with acidic soil. Recent test results said kindly that it needs some serious amending to grow anything other than wild blueberries or possibly potatoes.  

Garlic likes a lot of nitrogen, plus phosphate and potassium, which my ground can’t offer much of. I used a heavy layer of compost mix designed for raised beds to make up for this, and will fertilize more in the spring.

Once that was raked evenly, I marked where to plant: six inches apart in each row with a foot between rows.

My favorite time-saver there is measuring between tines of a garden fork, which are typically six inches apart, and pushing it lightly into the soil. You can also measure between your pinky finger and thumb and use that as a rough guide.

At last, I popped the cloves in vertically two inches deep with the pointy sides up and covered them with soil.

One more step: add a layer of mulch to protect the bulbs against freezing and thawing cycles. Straw is a common choice, but I ran out of time to find some. Imagine my surprise to learn you can use four to six inches of chopped leaves instead!

I filled a five-gallon bucket of leaves from a forested patch nearby and chopped them with a pair of pruners. I live on a ridge, meaning the wind can be pretty fierce. To keep these leaves in place, I’m using “bird netting,” or a thin mesh grid, held at the corners with rocks. I think it would be simple to create something similar at home with twine.

Now, we wait.

How about you? Do you have a winning method for garlic planting or a reliable trick to get the timing right? Tell me about it in the comments, or email [email protected].