How to Grow Thriving Garlic in the Pacific Northwest

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In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, Erin Hoover digs into growing garlic in Washington state. She covers the difference between hardneck and softneck varieties, shares her own experience growing garlic, and touches on elephant garlic as well.

Erin walks through the full growing process, from site selection and sourcing seed garlic through planting, care, and harvest, plus tips on curing for storage and keeping pests and disease at bay.

As a modern homesteader, Erin has turned her property into a small, thriving farm. She grows veggies, tends to fruit trees and shrubs, and raises livestock, all while keeping sustainability in mind. Her focus these days is on finding new uses for native plants, finding ways to feed her animals from her land, and growing her own food.

When she’s not working on the homestead or recording The Evergreen Thumb, you’ll find Erin out exploring Washington’s mountains, forests, and beaches, bringing new ideas home to try in her own garden.

• Growing Garlic in Home Gardens – WSU
• Growing Garlic – Skagit County Master Gardener Foundation
• Vegetables (Onions, Garlic) – WSU Hortsense
• General Onion/Allium Disease and Pest Management – WSU
• Effect of Scape Removal on Garlic Bulb Yield in Central Washington
• Making Garlic and Herb Infused Oils at Home
• The Evergreenthumb – Local Food Episodes

Erin Hoover (00:00)

Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb episode 82. A few weeks ago, I did an episode about planting fall bulbs for spring color, and I had a listener comment and ask about growing garlic in Washington. And I realized that it’s almost garlic planting season. So it’s a great opportunity to talk about planting garlic.

If you’re into vegetable gardening or if you’re just getting started, garlic is a great start. It’s low maintenance, it’s easy to grow, and it tastes delicious.

We’re going to talk about the different varieties of garlic and which ones grow better in certain conditions. We’ll talk about when to plant, how to plant, how to overwinter them, how to harvest them, and some curing basics, things like that. So we’re going to cover the whole process.

Garlic Varieties

So, first we’ll talk about varieties and types of garlic. There are two general varieties of garlic: Hardneck and Softneck.

Typically, Hardneck grows well in colder climates. The heads and the cloves are larger, but there are fewer of them. It has a shorter shelf life than Softneck garlic.

Softneck is the most adaptable type and typically is what you would get in the grocery store.

Hardneck varieties produce scapes, which are the shoots that would produce a flower. They tend to curl in the spring, and most Softneck varieties do not produce scapes because they have been bred not to.

Even if you don’t choose to eat the scapes, you should chop them off anyway because you don’t want that head of garlic putting that energy into producing the flower. You want that energy to go back into the bulbs.

What Garlic Erin Grows

I personally have grown several varieties of garlic over the years.

Most of what I’m growing right now is Music; it’s a Hardneck variety, and Nootka Rose is a Softneck variety. I’ve had good success with both of those. I’ve grown several others too, but this is what’s in my garden right now. Interestingly, even though WSU publications say Hardneck’s lifespan in storage is shorter than Softneck.

In my experience, it’s been the opposite. Come late winter, early spring, the Hardneck garlic was still edible, and the Softneck had kind of just shriveled up and gone mushy. So that’s just my personal experience. I don’t have a specific explanation as to why. It could be how I cured them; maybe I cured them differently, how I’m storing them, or it could be some variation between those two specific varieties.

Because of this, I’m considering moving to entirely growing just the Music variety and not continuing to grow the Nootka Rose. So I’m curious if you have had similar experiences, whether or not the varieties you grow match the research.

Elephant Garlic

Kind of as an aside for those of you who are familiar with elephant garlic. Elephant garlic isn’t actually a true garlic. It’s more closely related to leeks. It has a milder flavor. It’s aptly named elephant garlic because it’s huge. The individual cloves of elephant garlic are about the same size as an entire head of Hardneck garlic.

Their flavor is very mild. It’s kind of between a garlic and an oniony flavor. I do grow some of that. I enjoy it, but it is a very small portion of what I grow, and for me, they last. I’ve had them last two years if I didn’t eat ‘em all.

Tips for Planting Garlic

Erin Hoover (03:53)
So when it comes to planting, site selection is important. Garlic requires full sun, which means at least six hours of the day. Certified seed garlic is best because you know it’s free of insects and disease.

The general rule is about four to six weeks before the ground freezes, not necessarily just the first frost. So in western Washington, the ground doesn’t really freeze, but in eastern Washington, depending on where you are, it could be anywhere between mid-September and early October, before that colder weather comes in and you can’t plant garlic.

In western Washington, particularly in the Puget Sound region, you can wait until early to mid-November. A lot of this has to do, like I said, with when the ground freezes. So if you’ve got, you know, a hard freeze, it can make it really hard to dig, but also ideally you want to give the garlic a little bit of time to grow some roots, and if it’s warm, a leaf or two might come up; but also it has a lot to do with your growing season length.

Different parts of the state have different growing season lengths. So I would encourage you to check your local first frost data and determine what the best date is to get your garlic planted in your area. I probably plant mine a little earlier than I need to, but I always have mine in the ground by October first.

Preparing Garlic for Planting

How to prepare your garlic cloves for planting. You can save your hardiest cloves from the previous year’s crop if you are already growing garlic. If not, I recommend buying seed from a reputable grower. There are a number of garlic growers that sell seed garlic, and they are going to be growing the varieties that grow best in Washington.

I don’t recommend using ones that come from the grocery store for a number of reasons. Depending on where it was grown, it may not be acclimatized to our region. The garlic could be carrying mold or disease. It could be treated to prevent it from sprouting.

So, the first thing you want to do is you want to break apart the head so all the cloves are separate. You can do it up to about 10 days before planting, but it’s best to do it just right before planting.

You don’t need to peel each clove. Just make sure that they’re all well separated. And then for your soil, you want to make sure that the soil is loose and kind of fluffed up, maybe work in a little bit of compost, and that’s all you really need to do to prep your soil.

When you’re planting them, you want to space them four to six inches apart in rows 12 to 24 inches apart. So, I do it a little differently personally, and this works well for me.

Spacing Your Garlic Plants

If you’re starting out, I recommend going with WSU’s recommendations. But what I do is I plant the cloves like eight inches apart, and then the rows alternate. So the second row is only eight inches apart, but the cloves are not lined up in a row. They’re more of a zigzag between the two rows. So they’re offset. That works really well for me to get more garlic into the bed.

I grow a four-by-twenty-foot bed of garlic every year. So if you’re not planting that much, and you’re not trying to conserve space, or like I said, if you’re just starting out, start with the official four to six inches apart clove spacing, and the rows are 12 to 24 inches apart.

It’s important that the soil stays moist. You don’t want it to be soggy wet, but it does need to be watered if it’s not raining, for those plants to get a start before the cold sets in. This is especially important in eastern Washington if your soil is really dry going into winter. Come Octoberish, or into November in western Washington, that’s generally not a big issue.

Overwintering Garlic

So to overwinter the garlic, what I do is I mulch it with straw. You could mulch it with other things as well, and you can do up to like four inches of straw. This helps protect them from the cold. So if they do start to sprout a little bit, it helps protect them. And it also works really well for weed suppression.

In the spring, you might get a couple of sprouts if the straw has seeds in it, but I find those really easy to pull out because they’re just they’re on the surface; they’re not actually in the soil.

 So what to watch for? Shoots could emerge early if there’s a warm spell, so make sure that they’re well mulched and keep an eye on that over the winter.

In the spring, once things start to dry up a bit, you need to make sure that you start watering. I usually start watering in May. That’s when the rains tend to stop, and we kind of start getting into our summer season and getting our irrigation hooked back up.

Garlic Scapes

And then in about June, I think, is when, if you were to have Hardneck varieties, that’s when they’re gonna start to scape. The scapes are gonna pop up. When those start to curl, you’ll chop those off. You can either use them or compost them, but it is important to remove those scapes.

There was a study on the Columbia Basin; I’ll have to see if I can find a link to it, but they showed that when you remove those scapes, it increased bulb size and sped up the maturity for Hardneck types. You cut the scapes just above the top leaf whorl at the full coil stage,

Harvesting Garlic

When it comes to harvesting, the important thing to remember is to stop watering about four weeks before you’re ready to harvest.

The season for garlic is roughly 240 days, and that puts it at midsummer. For me, that’s usually mid to late July. So after I’ve harvested the scapes, that’s usually early to mid-June. So I will stop watering the garlic at that time. And that allows it to kind of start to harden up, and the leaves will start to die back and go from the bottom; they’ll start drying out, curling, and turning yellow or brown, and so when a third to a half of the leaves are yellow, that’s when you’re ready to test-dig a bulb and see if they look to be ready.

If they’re ready, you can start pulling all your garlic. When they’re not quite ready, give them a couple more weeks and then try again. If you want to keep your garlic through the winter and be able to use it, it is important to cure it.

Curing Garlic

For curing, it needs to sit out of direct sunlight, but where it gets good airflow. For me, we have a cyclone fence dog kennel, and I put it on top of that to cure. And you want to check it regularly; just brush off all the dirt from pulling it out of the soil as best you can. That helps them cure faster.

So then you want to check on them regularly, and when the necks are in, in the case of Hardneck, they become stiffer. And in the case of Softneck, they kind of just shrivel up and dry up. So you’ll wanna test a couple to make sure that there’s no green left when you cut the top off. If there’s any green left, they have not fully cured yet. So you want to let ‘em sit out for a little bit longer. But the important thing is to make sure that they do not get direct sunlight.

Similar to curing onions, they need that good airflow, but direct sunlight can cause them to start to break down, and they won’t store as well.

In my experience with Hardneck garlic, it tends to keep better for me. Keeps longer than Softneck. Softneck definitely has a much more pungent flavor. And so if you really like that pungent garlic taste, you might want to stick with Softneck. I like the little bit milder flavor, and I just use a little bit more, plus the cloves are bigger, so you get a little more of it. So I think it kind of balances out, in my opinion.

Garlic Pest and Disease Management

Erin Hoover (11:54)
Pest and disease management in garlic is something else to keep in mind. Garlic tends to be more susceptible to diseases than to insects. But a garlic clove that’s infected with disease or a pest could be small, misshapen, and definitely inedible. They won’t be pleasant. So this is why it’s important to only plant seed garlic that is certified free of disease and insect pests.

Each clove should be checked for damage before planting, and if they have any discoloration, stippling, or bruising, they need to be discarded. Garlic should be rotated at least every three years to prevent excessive disease or insect pressure.

Avoid planting onions and garlic in the same area because they’re susceptible to many of the same diseases and insects. So it’s important to separate onions and garlic by three years as well. If you need help identifying diseases or insect pests in your garlic, contact your local WSU Extension Master Gardener program.

Common Garlic Diseases

Some of the more common diseases in garlic are garlic rust. This looks like small white to yellow flecks and dark spots that are almost diamond-shaped.

Another common disease is black mold. This is indicated by discoloration at the neck with lesions and streaks of black; it’s usually more common in warm, dry climates.

There is a garlic mite. The cloves will often have brown streaks, indents, or stippling, and this can be prevented by promptly drying bulbs after harvesting and before storing.

White rot is another common disease. The cloves will have brown streaks, indents, or stippling. And again, WSU talks about that three-year rotation and making sure you’re separating onions to help prevent the crossover of these diseases.

Some other ones are, there’s grey mold, thrips, and basal rot, which is decay on the cloves and seedlings before foliage emerges. Basal rot could affect a single clove, or it can affect the entire bulb. So it’s important to make sure you’re planting in well-drained soil and do not over-fertilize.

Final Thoughts about Growing Thriving Garlic

Erin Hoover (14:17)
Just to kind of wrap up, I wanted to mention the regional timing again. So look for the local first frost date and get cloves in the ground starting, depending on where you are, anywhere between mid-September and early November.  

Don’t wait too long to get them in the ground because they do need some time to establish, and keep them watered if it’s not raining.

 And that about wraps it up. So I’d love to hear about your experiences growing garlic; shoot me a message at hello@theevergreenthumb.org or find us on social media. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.