Fall Planting and Fall Growth

 

Yes, you really can plant garlic in a T-shirt and shorts...

at least, so far it has been working just fine on our farm.

One of the main concerns I hear is that the garlic will come up in the fall if you plant too soon, and it certainly does sometimes, but even 4 -6 inches of leaf emergence in the fall has, thus far in my experience, not slowed the garlic down in the spring at all. Infact... is there a possibility that the extra energy gathered from the photosynthesis of the leaves prior to winter actually speeds it up?! 

That is the point of planting garlic in the fall, after all, to give it a head start. But how much of a head start is enough, and not too much?

Julie planting Rocamboles and other kinds, Sept 22, 2023

I've written a post already about how I keep my seed garlic at room temperature prior to planting it (at the same temperature as the garlic I plan to store and eat for the winter) because then it doesn't break dormancy until the moment it is planted, meaning you can plant earlier and delay emergence by at least a week or so. I do that because it's easy for me to store it all in one place, but also, it's not that I want the garlic to get really advanced by the time it freezes over in the late fall. Yes, I agonize about warm weather popping those little shoots out too early, just like everyone else. I figure there is a sweet spot for fall growth. But, I do my best to pick the right time, when the weather and the soil is right, and once it is planted that ship has sailed. 

What I find interesting about the last two years, is the long period of warm dry weather we've gotten after planting on September 20th. I start to wonder if I might be better delaying planting by a week. The thing is, without cold, wet soil, the garlic doesn't seem to be in any hurry to grow, so it's kind of like pre-loading the soil with your garlic cloves and waiting for mother nature to pull the trigger. (The only concern you might have is if the garlic rots or gets eaten before it gets growing, but I've found it pretty resilient if you start with good cloves.) 

This fall, I checked on my planted cloves a week later, on Sept 27th, and other than a slight swelling of the root nodules, there was nothing happening, which reminded me of last year. 

Then, I checked on October 13th, and this was all that the porcelain cloves had accomplished:

 I expected the Rocambole cloves to be more advanced. Rocamboles have a shorter tolerance for temperature and humidity fluctuations bringing them out of dormancy. I actually plan to plant them on the last day of my main planting window for this very reason. But, for just being planted on Sept 22, by October 13th, this is all that the rocamboles achieved in terms of root growth, not even a shoot yet:

Turban varieties sprout even faster than Rocamboles, so I plant them even later, and just to highlight the differences in varieties, this Turban strain "Xian" was planted October 5th and looked like this eight days later: 

Mind you, the weather had also gotten colder and wetter, so the growth on that last planting may have been accelerated by that. The soil conditions were wetter on October 5th, which is why I only did about a hundred root row of Turbans and some bulbils with hand tools, rather than bring out the tractor and squish our clay loam into road ways that day. Our clay loam soil is why I plant on September 20th, and I don't know if it's just us, but this is what the field looks like 3 weeks later, nothing is up yet:

In conclusion, I plant my garlic plot within our winter wheat field, and pretty much follow the winter wheat guide, for planting time. The expert in our area says 10 days before September 20 up to ten days after, is the ideal time to plant winter wheat. Aiming for the middle of that window has worked well for our garlic for almost 20 years, no matter how unnerving the weather can get sometimes. Hope springs eternal, and for the most part, so does garlic!