garlic should be planted in the fall. it will grow if planted now but not form cloves and will not store

Do you already have it and just didn't get it planted? If so no need to waste it. Plant it and hope for the best or use it in cooking.

If you haven't bought it yet then I'd save the money and order for fall planting this year.

Dave

Yeah, cook what you've got and eat it. Get more for this fall, as you're not going to get a good harvest out of them planting this late. You might get cloves, but they'll be very small.

If you've got some just lying around, you can plant it in small pots and then place them amongst your upcoming summer crops. They're supposed to be good at deterring certain pests, like aphids.

Kevin

I put some cloves in pots a couple of weeks ago, and I'm going to transplant them to the garden as soon as I can work the soil. The room they're in is in the 40s all winter, so we'll see it that's enough to get them to divide and form cloves. The roots are already around the bottom of the pots.

Actually, late winter/early spring planting is recommended by several extension service pubs in Zones 5 and northward. Here in Z 6, several local organic growers plant extra garlic as soon as the ground thaws.

It often happens the experts disagree,,,I always fall planted my garlic, and i still do with quite a bit of it. The past two years i have planted my red russian in feb. and have had fantastic results,,, one of the problems with winter planting is getting that window of weather good enough to carry it out, great sized garlic thats keeps cannot be planted too late granted, but in my opinion too early often leads to freeze back on tops that got too far along before winter hit, as they say timing is everything, success is also related to the genetics you have in your seed garlic, rich soil, ample composted manure(chicken lately here), and good curing practices, if the weather allows and you have some local grown garlic give it a try.

I'd agree, plant it now if you have it.

While I generally plant garlic in the fall, on several occasions I have gotten frozen out and end up planting during a warm spell in Feb. Those planting have worked OK. Perhaps not as big as they would have been fall planted, but still respectable.

50 degrees here today, so I went ahead and planted three large bulbs' worth of organic cloves I got at Trader Joe's. I had an old bale of straw, so I covered it with that and put a piece of plywood over that with some cinderblocks on top to hold it down in the incredibly windy weather we've been having here lately. I'll take it off as soon as it looks like precipitation is on the way. It felt good to be out there. The ground seemed to be frozen about 4 inches down. Sometimes it's just a lot of fun to see if something will work.

Not sure about Iowa, but in California, I plant them in October or November. These turn out very well.

Once I planted garlics in Spring, but they didn't mature, and very few turned to cloves. They withered and died in the summer heat.

Just harvested my first bulb of garlic from the batch I planted on Feb 17. I counted 12 cloves on this one. Garlic is supposed to be a heavy feeder, but I used no fertilizer other than the general broadcast of horse manure I do in the fall. Pretty exciting, if you ask me.

This post was edited by Creek-side on Mon, Jul 15, 13 at 20:10

Plant garlic in late fall and in most zones and worry about it next year in June/July. If you are in an extreme zone then it could be tricky.

Oh make sure to check your extention service to see if hard neck or soft neck are recommended for your zone.

This post was edited by dirtguy50 on Mon, Jul 15, 13 at 23:20

Thanks for the update! It is nice to see how these things turn out.

--McKenzie

What happened to the stem ? Probably harvested too late !!!?

As for the stem, the ground is very hard and the stem broke off when I tried to pull out the bulb.