This is our second year growing garlic. We used cloves from the first year's harvest. We are having fun, but don't exactly know what we are doing! We plant the cloves, cover with dead leaves/cardboard for the winter, uncover in the spring, and wait to harvest scapes and bulbs. That's it.
What are your garlic growing tips/strategies? Do you feed your bulbs at any particular time?
I never fed the garlic specifically, but just prepared the whole garden with finished compost. We planted grocery store garlic cloves and seed garlic from an existing local patch. They seem to really like coffee grounds.
I have a roughly neutral pH here, I just add coffee grounds to loosen things up and force my little invertebrate minions to stay near the surface and chew up the clay pasture soil for me. We've seen a huge increase in worm castings from as deep as 30 inches below the surface this year. Very satisfying. They don't care about drought, they farm while I sleep in!
Nice! I'm based near Michigan so our soil is fairly loamy anyway, but we grow out garlic in raised beds so that doesn't really matter for us. Sure is a pain to set up though