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 realize this thread is a week old but I wanted to offer my input. I think seysonn might be missing what mckenziek is asking. Mckenzies is asking how to figure out which zone is local when factoring in elevation (which zip code maps ignore to a large degree) of your specific location. For example: I live on top of a hill near Marysville, WA (98270 zip) at around 600 feet elevation. If I plug my zip code into a map tool, I usually get a hardiness zone of 7b. Now, I have 2 separate digital weather stations at my house with outside thermometers located at opposite ends of the property. I have watched (and actually logged) my daily temperatures and I know for a fact that if intellicast or one of the other weather forecast sites says a low of 38, my weather stations will almost always register a low several degrees lower (elevation) and likewise, my highs will often be a few degrees above the official airport weather station's measurement. This is probably due to a combination of elevation and other micro-climate effects. To answer Mckenziek's true question, there may be a broad brush calculator that figures out the local zone including the elevation but I seriously doubt it due to micro climates. I suggest getting a good thermometer or two and actually doing the measurements yourself for a year. If you do that, you'll be able to get a feel for the specific temperature extremes and you can use your localize annual low to determine the true zone number. You'll need to do this several years to get a decent sample size but you'll get a bit of an instinctive feel for it in the process.

>i could dig but i suspect i'd hit frozen ground an 1" downShows you how different conditions can be. Last year my frost line barely went down an inch. Most years it's only a couple of inches; nothing like the deep frozen soils I experienced when living up north. One year the frost line went down 42 inches. But Martin actually planted in ground that was frozen, to prove a point. I was going to replicate his experiment, but with a long run of warm days, none of my ground was actually frozen when I planted. But we did get hard frosts almost immediately afterwards. The thing to keep in mind is that garlic is a bulb designed to go through a winter dormancy in ground that freezes hard; such as in Siberia. The bulb, itself, will freeze solid, then recover and start growing. The danger of late planting (other than the theoretical one of rot) is that without a root structure the bulbs are likely to shift during freeze/thaw cycles. So, while you'll get a garlic plant from that clove, it might not be growing where you set it.

Yeah, I'm with you, except I have not put all of my hoses away yet...I just drain and unhook them every evening. I've been watering my trees like a mad woman.