When I decided to try growing garlic over 10 years ago, I bought a couple of heads from an organic grocery store. I did some research later & determined that they're hardnecks. It was too confusing to read descriptions of the various named types so I gave up wanting a name for what I grow. Every year I plant in the fall & harvest late spring. Of course, I save a portion of every harvest to replant in the fall. I hope everyone knows that garlic improves w/acclimatization. For that reason, I don't understand why people purchase garlic to grow every year. My garlic heads have huge cloves, & each clove is protected in a tough skin that is comparable to that of soft-shell pecans! I am a single-person household, so I share w/my closest family & friends. They all love my garlic & wait for their share every year.

Grass clippings can harbor rust and infect your garlic crop with that disease if they are used for mulch. Both myself and a friend had this happen. No rust after we stopped using the grass clippings. Also, yes, it is normal for the feeder roots to seek out heat, moisture and nutrition in the top layer of the soil. Here where the winters are relatively mild, I believe that the roots grow all winter. My early, soft-neck varieties get pretty sad looking without a good dose of high nitrogen fertilizer in late winter or early spring. I have already fed and mulched two times this year. All-in-all, it appears that I will be having a good harvest this year if we don't have late rains as we have had the past two or three years.

Thanks for replying, kimmsr. This all seems more and more like a no-win situation this year. And yet someone on GardenWeb said that she produced one little bucket of weeds per summer out of a 3,550 or so square foot flower garden. Maybe she used four to six inches of mulch, I don't know, but I thought it was two or three. Also, I went on a garden tour recently, and four people had flower gardens about the size of mine, and they seemed to be using about one inch of Soil Pep. (Either they told me that's how much they used, or I dug a little back with my fingers to find out.) These gardens were being maintained by one person, and they were from 13 to 20 years old (the gardens, that is; the people were much older!). Possibly the explanation for this is that over the years they had depleted the seeds in the soil bank by sprouting and then killing them, obviously without letting any of them form more seeds. The real Catch-22 for me is that I actually want seeds to sprout in my mulch, but only my flower seeds, not the weed seeds. With an extremely thick, rough-textured mulch (say, six inches of arborist's wood chips), how on earth does anyone manage to have self-seeding flowers, or clumping shrubs and grasses, or spreading ground covers, or bulbs? How does anyone direct-sow seeds? It almost seems that you'd need to cover the native soil with thin layers of weed-free soil/compost/fine mulch repeatedly, and continually hand-weed, to get this to work. If the mulch, which is being used to cover the weed-seed-filled soil, accumulates weed seeds itself, it would make sense to me to add more mulch to cover the first mulch, maybe twice a year. So if I put down too much mulch at first, I wouldn't be able to add more until some of the first had decomposed (and then too many weed seeds would accumulate in it). There must be an optimal amount of mulch to add per year, after taking into account how much of it decomposes each year. This should lead to the level of mulch slowly increasing every year. I need to figure out what that amount should be when I'm using Soil Pep (or small bark chips on the paths and around trees). On the other hand, at the very beginning I need to add enough to somewhat effectively suppress weeds, not so little that it merely encourages them. Then there's the price. All total, including the vegetable garden, I actually have 5,715 square feet to cover with either mulch (Soil Pep in my case: 4,525 square feet) or wood chips (for paths and around trees: 1,190 square feet). They're both $4.49 for a two-cubic-foot bag. (I'm actually leaving out the cost of compost, sphagnum moss, rock phosphate, greensand, and elemental sulfur, because I consider those as more conditioners or fertilizers than mulches and they have very little bulk. But they still cost a lot of money.) At one inch I'd need 189 bags of mulch and 50 bags of chips, for a total of $1,073. At two inches I'd need 377 bags of mulch and 99 bags of chips, for a total of $2,137. And so on: three inches would cost $3,210, and four inches would cost $4,279. Five or six inches is out of the question for physical reasons. The beds and paths aren't raised, contained, edged, or separated, so the material would just spill over at the edges. I have many flowers, including tall ones like hollyhocks and delphiniums, that only get five or six inches tall the first and even second year. (Weird, I know.) I can't completely bury my flowers; that would defeat the whole purpose. I guess two to three inches per year is all I can handle, both money-wise and time-wise. Our car can hold 12 bags, so each inch takes 20 trips. It takes a lot of time just to buy, load, haul around, and distribute all of that material. I guess what I want to know is: If I add one inch of Soil Pep twice a year, and less than that decomposes each year, so that eventually I have an ongoing level of three inches on average, will that make much difference in the amount of time I have to spend weeding? Should I leave my dead lupine vegetation lying around to add to the mulch and not worry about the powdery mildew?

Peter - try putting chicken wire or some other type of cheap fencing over your new garlic plantings in the fall to keep the squirrels from digging them up while burying their nuts. It also helps to keep the mulch in place. I pull the fencing off in the spring when the garlic starts growing and the squirrels don't bother it I guess because they didn't bury any nuts there in the fall. Moles did in some of my garlic by tunneling under them causing the seed cloves to drop down too far so I need to get them under control this year. I planted 36 shallot bulbs last October (18 red and 18 Dutch Yellow). All 18 of the red are growing great, but only about half of the Dutch Yellow made it thru the winter and of the ones that did most are not looking nearly as healthy as the reds. I just got back from picking up a pound of red shallots from the local Chinese market to replace the yellows which is the same place I got the reds last fall. Can't beat $1.49lb!