Growing Garlic - Second Attempt

I was pleasantly surprised by how well my first attempt at growing garlic went that this year the plan was to grow even more than last year.  This year I am devoting an entire bed to nothing but garlic and I even went out of my way to buy seed garlic from local farmers.  Seed garlic is just like regular garlic with the exception that it will be the biggest heads from the last harvest.  Garlic can adapt to different growing conditions and if you save your best and biggest heads and plant them you will get more of your best and biggest garlic to use in your kitchen year after year.

Planting garlic actually takes place in the fall and unfortunaly I didn't take any pictures when I planted this round of garlic.  I do however have some pictures from about a month ago.

 

This was taken shortly after I removed the row cover I had over them all winter.  The plastic sheeting was shredded by a wind storm so it wasn't doing much for protecting them anyways.  As you can see some of the plants are good sized and they actually sprouted sometime last November.  Once the weather got cold the plants just go dormant and wait for it to warm back up again.  These plants may have had a bit of an advantage since I covered them with plastic all winter - so they might have actually grown a little through winter also.  The real reason I covered them was to keep the chickens out of them when I let them run around in the garden in the winter.

 

Here is what they look like this week:

 

As you can see they have definately been growing!  The bigger plants are from the local farmer's seed garlic and the smaller ones are what was left of last years harvest.  Next year I hope to have enough to plant all of it from what we save from this harvest.  With as big as some of those plants are, we should have plenty, maybe even enough to make our own garlic powder.  The next thing I have to perfect is curing them properly.  Last year we had a rainy spell around the same time we were curing our garlic and we lost about half our harvest to rot.  Lesson learned - next time I will watch the weather like a hawk!