Why Garlic Is the Most Forgiving Crop You Are Probably Not Growing Enough Of

Garlic suffers, in British gardening culture, from a peculiar reputation problem. It is considered a crop that requires something: a particular soil preparation, a favoured variety sourced from the right supplier, a carefully timed planting window observed with the attention one might give to a souffle. The result, in a great many kitchen gardens, is a single cautious row of cloves pressed into the ground with a certain lack of conviction, followed by a harvest of fifteen or twenty heads that disappears into the kitchen by the end of September and is forgotten about until the following spring, when the cycle begins again.

This is, I would suggest, entirely the wrong way to approach garlic. And if you have a bed sitting roughly empty right now, as many gardens do in the first days of September, I would ask you to read on before you decide what to do with it.

Garlic is not a specialist crop

The idea that garlic demands specialist treatment is almost entirely unfounded, at least for UK growing conditions. It is not tender in the way that basil is tender or aubergines are tender. It does not need a season of careful heat management or a dedicated heated propagator. What it needs, in essence, is:

• Reasonably free-draining soil
• A cold period to encourage the cloves to split into full heads (this is called vernalisation, and a British autumn and winter provides it naturally without any intervention on your part)
• The good sense to leave it more or less alone once planted

Where garlic does fail, it tends to fail for one of two reasons. Either it was planted into cold, waterlogged ground in January or February, when the soil was too wet and too compacted to drain properly, or it was planted in spring under the mistaken impression that spring planting is more or less equivalent to autumn planting. It is not. Autumn planting, in my own garden and in the experience of most growers who have done both, produces substantially larger bulbs because the plant has had months in the ground before it puts on its main flush of growth. Spring-planted garlic is not useless, but it is a noticeably lesser thing. Plant in September or October, ideally before the middle of October, and you are giving your garlic the best possible foundation.

The soil preparation that garlic actually requires is not onerous. It benefits from having been improved with compost at some point, though it does not need the kind of deep, rich bed you might create for courgettes. If your soil is heavy clay, which is common enough in Surrey and across much of the south-east, the one amendment worth making is grit worked into the planting area to improve drainage: a persistently wet crown is the genuine enemy here, not clay itself. I have grown perfectly good garlic in a no-dig raised bed with a layer of compost on top and never done anything more elaborate than that.

On variety, a clear recommendation

The softness versus hardness debate among garlic varieties is real but often presented as more complicated than it is. Here is the plain version. Softneck varieties store for longer and suit plaiting, which is useful if you are growing at scale. Hardneck varieties generally have better, more complex flavour, produce fewer but larger cloves that are far easier to peel, and are better suited to the cold, damp winters that British gardens routinely deliver. For most home growers, hardneck is the obvious choice.

Two varieties I return to without hesitation are 'Lautrec Wight' and 'Chesnok Wight', both grown on the Isle of Wight and both performing consistently well in UK conditions. 'Lautrec Wight' is a pink-skinned hardneck with a rich, full flavour that holds well through roasting. 'Chesnok Wight' is the one I tend to reach for if I am cooking for keeping, as the flavour mellows and sweetens rather than dissipating with heat. Both are available from reputable UK suppliers, and both will see you straight if you give them a decent autumn planting. The Isle of Wight varieties in general carry the advantage of being grown in British conditions and then kept in cold store rather than imported from warmer climates, which means the cloves arrive in better condition for planting.

On the question of supermarket garlic: do not plant it. The varieties sold in UK supermarkets are almost always grown in China or Spain and have often been treated to suppress sprouting. More to the point, they are not bred for British growing conditions and the resulting bulbs tend to be disappointing. This is one of the few areas of kitchen gardening where buying the right planting stock from the outset genuinely matters.

Saving your own cloves

Provided your original stock was healthy, saving your best cloves to replant is entirely worth doing. Select the largest, most vigorous heads from your harvest, keep them in a cool, dry place through summer, and break them into individual cloves immediately before planting. Do not save cloves from any bulbs that showed signs of white rot or rust during the season; that is the one caveat that actually matters. Garlic that has been grown in your specific soil and conditions for a season or two will often adapt and perform better than fresh bought stock, and the economics are obvious.

The one thing to watch is that over several years of saving, vigour can slowly decline if you are selecting for size alone without any fresh genetic input. Bringing in new planting stock every three or four years keeps things honest.

How much to actually grow

Here is where most gardeners undersell themselves, and I say this with some affection because I did the same thing for years. A row of fifteen or twenty cloves feels like a reasonable amount until you consider how quickly garlic disappears when you are cooking properly. A household that uses garlic regularly, as most do, will go through a head or two each week without effort. Fifteen heads is ten weeks of garlic, roughly, assuming some go to waste or are given away. It is not enough.

Thirty to forty heads, which sounds ambitious but requires only a bed of perhaps one and a half by two metres depending on spacing, makes a material difference. You will still run out before the following harvest, almost certainly, but you will cover the most expensive stretch of the year: the period when good-quality British garlic from specialist growers is in the shops and costs considerably more than the imported alternatives. What you save over those few months is real money, and the quality difference between home-grown hardneck garlic and a supermarket bulb is, frankly, not a small thing.

Planting technique

Plant cloves approximately fifteen centimetres apart in each direction. Point upwards, flat base down, pushed far enough into the soil that the tip of the clove is just beneath the surface. If your soil is worked and reasonably fine, no further preparation is needed. In heavier ground, a dibber or the end of a cane makes the job cleaner than trying to push cloves in by hand, which tends to compress the soil directly beneath and can impede root development. A sharp pair of bypass secateurs is useful at this stage not for the planting itself but for trimming off any damaged outer skin from the cloves before they go in, which I find reduces the risk of them sitting wet and rotting before they establish. Clean cuts dry clean; that is the principle.

The window right now

September is not a deadline that has already passed. It is the beginning of the main planting season for garlic, and early September is as good a time as any to be pressing cloves into prepared ground. If you have a bed that is clearing now, as beds do at this turn of the season when summer crops are lifted and the space opens up, then garlic is the obvious and arguably the best thing you can put into it. It will ask almost nothing of you through autumn and winter, a little weeding perhaps, and then it will grow away quietly through spring without requiring any real intervention.

There is something rather pleasant about that, actually. Most of September gardening is about effort: lifting, dividing, raking, sowing. Garlic is one of the few crops where the act of planting is essentially the entire job. Everything after that is waiting and, come July, lifting.

Order your planting stock now if you have not already, because the better hardneck varieties sell out consistently by October. Prepare the bed. Plant more than you think you need. That last part is the one piece of advice, from my own entirely reliable experience, that nobody has ever regretted taking.