I planted forty cloves of garlic in November and as of this morning, all forty are up. Every single one pushed through the soil. That is a 100% germination rate, which feels like it should not be surprising for garlic but still makes me happy every time.
They are about three to four inches tall right now, thin bright green shoots that look a little like the world's smallest onions. The bed has straw mulch over it from when I planted in fall, and the shoots are coming up through the gaps in the straw. Everything looks healthy.
Forty cloves in November. All forty are up by March. I will take that every time.
I am trying something different this year: I planted all softneck garlic (Inchelium Red) instead of my usual mix of softneck and hardneck. My dad mentioned that softneck stores better — up to a year with proper curing, versus three to six months for most hardneck types. Since I always end up with more garlic than we can use before it starts to go soft, it made sense to try the longer-storing kind.
The tradeoff is that softneck does not produce scapes. Scapes are the curly green shoots that hardneck garlic sends up in spring, and they are one of my favorite things about growing garlic — you cut them off (which helps the bulb grow bigger) and use them exactly like garlic in cooking. The pesto I made from scapes last spring was incredible. I will miss them this year.
Garlic is a lesson in patience. I planted in November, the cloves are up in March, but harvest is not until late June or early July — four more months from now. No other crop in my garden has a timeline like that. Tomatoes take 90 days from transplant. Radishes take 25 days from seed. Garlic takes nine months from clove to bulb, basically like growing a whole winter.
But the payoff is worth it. Homegrown garlic is genuinely different from grocery store garlic — stronger, more complex, with flavor that does not disappear after the first minute of cooking. I use it in almost everything. Forty bulbs should last us until next fall's planting if I portion it carefully.