Year two of growing garlic was a vast improvement over our first year of growing. To be fair, our first year was quite the kick at the can, with little knowledge of what needed to be done. Luckily, I have a fantastic co-worker who gave great guidance and advice, which is why we actually managed to have some garlic harvested.

Our first year, the biggest mistake we made was not keeping on top of the weeds. We didn’t realize that garlic could be a little finicky and not like sharing it’s space. We did weed, but definitely not enough, which resulted in generally smaller heads of garlic.

This year, we were devising ways to fix that issue, and the main way we did that was leaving the winter mulch on it. It was an un-intentional fix as we had actually planned to remove the thick layer of straw and had just planned on weeding the garlic patch weekly to ensure nothing was competing.

Moving forward, we will leave the straw on the bed because we actually think it helped two-fold. The first being keeping the weeds down, the second allowing the straw to help the bed retain moist soil during the hot dry days of summer.

The bed also had much better soil in it as we made sure to top it up with some rich composted soil to ensure that there would be good nutrients. There is good drainage in the area which made sure that the water wasn’t pooling and rotting the cloves.

Nothing is for certain and we really won’t know if our actions were fluke or if there was some solid reasoning to what we did that actually made the difference we saw. We will find out as we implement the same actions over the next few years and hopefully continue to improve.

So what are we going to do to improve the garlic harvest for next year?

Well, though our irrigation of the bed was much better than the previous year, and the mulch helped keep the bed from drying like a desert cracked ground, we could still improve.

One side of our bed did still result in some smaller heads of garlic. I believe this is because it wasn’t getting enough water once the big leaves on the garlic grew. Although we did have a sprayer on that side of the bed, it was old and didn’t do a good job. We unfortunately didn’t realize until well into the growing season.

Next year, the patch will receive new sprayers, wherever we decide to put it.

Other than more consistent watering over the whole bed, nothing else. We will see how that change affects our outcomes in July 2025. Hopefully it will result with consistent sized cloves throughout the entire garlic patch.

How are we preparing?

As we harvested our garlic this year, I put aside a bag of harvested garlic that we will use to plant for our 2025 harvest. The cloves that we will be using will be medium – large, hopefully resulting in good heads next year with nice hearty cloves.

Once we decide where we will be putting them this year, I am going to make sure to turn a few bags of nutrient rich, composted soil into the bed to ensure it has lots to feed from. I have a few ideas of where I would like it to go, but would like to do a little extra research to ensure I am not planting it after a crop that may utilize the same nutrients. I don’t want to set ourselves back with a poor choice of location.

I may also get some other variety to try out. We have been growing Red Russian the last 2 years, which I quite like, but the nursery we go to had quite the variety of garlic last year. Though it will cost me initially for the new variety, if we like it and it grows well, then we can us our own grown cloves next year and keep growing 2 varieties.

Again this might take a bit of research to make sure we are getting something quite different from Red Russian. If I am going to grow 2 varieties, I would like to make it noticeable.

All-in-all, it is a good garlic year. If I have room, I may expand so that I have more that I can give to family and friends. Last year we had enough to make it to March. This year, we should have enough to make it through to next year’s harvest, but we will see. I’ll plant a bit extra regardless this year in hopes of sharing more.