Gardening Tips : How to Plant Garlic Seeds

Have you ever felt the infinite potential and amazing power when you hold a seed in your hand? It is a pretty amazing feeling. With the increasing demands for more food for lower prices, farming practices have changed over the years and change doesn’t always mean progress. 

Many of today’s seeds are hybrids and don’t breed true so if you wanted to save your own seed to grow in your own garden you’re not going to get the same results. I often find this a scary thought. And it gets even worse than that. Many of today’s produce doesn’t even produce seed, for example: the seedless watermelon. Often the seeds from produce in the store are sterile and wouldn’t even make viable plants if you saved seed from the produce you buy from your local grocery store. 

Some plants have lost their ability to even flower. Garlic has two major categories HardneckGarlic and Softneck Garlic. The Hardneck means that it is sending up a flower stock called a garlic scape. This stock turns hard like wood with maturity and produces a flower head up top which contains garlic seed.  

The common technique for Garlic is to break a bulb into individual cloves and plant the cloves as the garlic seed. This is the quickest way to get a good harvest of garlic. Garlic grown from cloves mature to a good size the first year you plant and harvest them.  

The lesser known way of planting garlic seed is from the garlic bulbil on top of the scape.  A garlic bulbil head is a great option if you want a lot of garlic for a little price and can afford to wait a couple of years. Bulbils on Garlic scapes have many seeds and can usually be purchased inexpensively. Garlic scapes are also a great way to help your garlic adjust to it’s new home. 

However, it will take 2 to 3 years for your abundant garlic to mature to full size. The first year the garlic is very small and will need to be harvested and replanted. The second year you may have some mature to full size or you may may need to harvest and replant again. 

Now some good news. No matter what garlic seed you choose to use, cloves or bulbils from garlic scapes, you will always have great garlic to eat! Most people know and love to eat the garlic cloves but there are so many other stages of life that garlic that can be enjoyed.  First year planted garlic scapes look like a bed of chives and can be eaten as such. The taste is very fresh with an infusion of garlic flavor.

Happy planting!!

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