Ah spring is finally here.
Seems like winter has been unusually harsh here in St. Louis this year. I have been wanting to plant my garlic bulbs for some time now before spring arrives and had to wait until the snow from last week melted away.
Weather was real nice today here with about 50 C or so with cloudy skies and its definitely a good day for some yard work 
Finally I was able to sow my garlic for this year. Yeah I know its a bit late – things were a bit hectic last fall that I wasn’t able to plant them then. I think good time to plant garlic is late fall and early spring, though spring planting won’t produce abundance in garlic nor bigger garlic bulbs when they are ready to be cultivated.
I had bought a couple of purple glazer garlic bulbs from Territorial Seed Company during fall 2006 and they had produced about 1lb during last year’ cultivation. These have been cooling off since last fall in my basement.
I cleaned them up a bit and separated them to individual cloves before planting.
Finding a good spot was a bit of a challenge as most of the “good” sunny spots have been taken over by other perennials -more on that later
I prefer doing companion planting (my blog post on companion planting here) and was able to find a couple of ice spots in between my rose bushes.
Time to get dirty
Dug up the ground about an 2″ deep and planted them about 5″apart. Will have to wait and see how well the garlic grows this year. I saw the weather futurecast and see that we might get some rain end of this week – I bet my garlic bulbs would love to see some rain 
Here are some information on planting garlic:
- Best to be planted in late fall or early spring
- Need a sunny spot
- Garlic grows well in soil rich in organic matter
- Plant garlic with pointy side facing up and about 2″ below soil level
- Spacing between garlic bulbs should be about 4″ apart
- Garlic loves nitrogen rich fertilizer – last year I had good success by using Alaska fish fertilizer.
