Memphis Backyard Farmer

Better late than never? I hope so. I’m only today getting my garlic planted. We’ve got a warm spell this week, so the weather is nice enough to get some things done.

This year’s plot is a little different than last year’s. I planted another 60 cloves (like last year). But if you notice the picture above, I have markers placed for divided sections of twenty cloves each. Last year I bought a big bag of garlic from Costco, divided the cloves, and planted. This year, I bought another bag, but I also bought a small bag of organic garlic, and took three heads of garlic that I grew last year, and divided those. So, I have three different types of garlic planted, to compare with each other. I’ve marked them above with “O” for organic, “S” for Scott garlic, and “R” for regular, or conventional, store-bought garlic. Eventually, I’d like to only grow garlic that I’ve cultivated, but we just didn’t have enough left from last year’s crop to plant a full bed. Read that last statement carefully; we probably pulled in 55 heads of garlic of the 60 we planted. But just like a raise in your paycheck, any extra you have gets consumed quickly. We have burned through an enormous amount of garlic since July when we harvested.

For those of you who haven’t planted garlic before, you should. It’s incredibly easy, and it’s so rewarding to have long braids of fresh garlic hanging in your kitchen, ready to pull anytime you need to add a little spice to a meal.

Here’s our first braid of our first ever crop of garlic. And this is just one braid – we have more! We eat tons of garlic here, so this will be a money/life saver around here. Very excited – had to share.

Oh – and thanks to my wife for the beautiful braid. She took initial clues from Garden Nerd’s video here.

Front of Braid

Back of Braid