10/15/2026
Let's talk garlic!
So you’re planning on planting a patch of garlic in your garden, but don’t know how many pounds to buy? You’re not alone, it’s a calculation we have to make every time based on how big the bulbs are that year. This year our seed garlic is large, running around 32 cloves/pound. So that’s how many plants you’ll get out of a pound of seed! Now what about how much area that is going to occupy in the garden? While you can plant garlic cloves as close as 6” apart from each other, you will have much more yield out of each clove if you go 8-12” apart. To figure out how many cloves you need for a bed, you first figure out the in-row spacing: if it’s 9”, then you can multiply the number of feet you’re planting by 1.33 to get the number of cloves you need. Then just multiply that how many rows you’re planting and you’ll have your total. We plant 3 widely-spaced rows to a bed at 6” in-row spacing, but 5 rows on a more or less square grid of 9-10” spacing is the same number of cloves per bed. It helps to sketch it out!
How should I prepare the soil for garlic?
Besides all the basic nutrient and mineral balancing, liming and organic matter applications which are fundamental to success at any kind of organic gardening (and which you should do a basic soil test with UMaine to check in on what’s happening in your soil), garlic appreciates fall fertilizing prior to planting. If you are planning to leave mulch on the crop up until harvest, it will be helpful to do most of your fertilizing in the fall. The mulch will minimize leaching over winter, and it’s just not that easy to apply fertilizer in the spring with the mulch there, although there are ways but it either involves scratching in fertilizer with your fingers around each plant, or foliar feeding by spraying on a solution of liquid fish and seaweed. The soil tests give you some easy to follow recommendations for organic fertilizer applications ahead of planting, but most people will probably benefit from a balanced organic fertilizer applied at a rate of around 100 #/acre of actual nitrogen. Calculating that is a little complicated, so I won’t get into all of that here. Bottom line is, get a soil test
