[Market-farming] planting garlic

Glen Eco Farm glenecofarm at planetcomm.net
Mon Sep 15 21:39:09 EDT 2008


I always chisel plow, then disc my ground to get a deeply tilled and well 
worked plot and lay out sets of three rows spaced a foot apart with my 
Farmall Cub tooled up with the rear mounted spring tooth harrow with all of 
the teeth removed but three.  The beauty of this tool is that by moving 
teeth around I can make any row spacing I desire from 1' to 5 1/2'.  Three 
rows spaced one foot apart gives me a bed two feet wide which tracks between 
the rear wheels spaced four feet apart.  By running one side of the Cub on 
the track of its previous pass I get a two foot wide space between the beds.

In the past I have always crawled between the beds on hands and knees to 
plant the cloves by sticking them into the soft soil by hand, then running a 
hand push plow between the rows to cover.  This is several hours work to 
plant around 3000 cloves.  This year I plan to avoid the hands and knees bit 
by trying a home made tool consisting of a 3 1/2' piece of series 40 one 
inch PVC pipe with a bevel on one end and the top half of a 1/2 gallon 
plastic soap jug stuffed neck first onto the other end making a funnel end. 
I will drop the cloves into the funnel as I walk down the rows.  This tool 
has worked well for planting fava beans and sweet corn in the past.   I have 
tried it on garlic in the past and ended up going back on hands and knees as 
it didn't really save that much time and I thought I had better precision 
with the old method.  However it does save my knees and my blue jeans and I 
am going to try it again.

I haven't been mulching my garlic and generally it does fine in our mild 
Virginia winters, leaving open the option of running through in the spring 
with cultivators.  This year I might mulch at least part of it just to see 
if it gives me some advantage.

Marlin Burkholder

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Andy Fellenz" <fellenz at fltg.net>
To: "Market Farming" <market-farming at lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 14, 2008 1:01 PM
Subject: Re: [Market-farming] planting garlic


> You could do the following:
>
> > Work up the bed.  For this quantity it may be easiest to use a
> walk-behind rototiller
> > Set a string line and cut a furrow using a Warren hoe or the side of
> a onion hoe (just use something to cut a relatively narrow but several
> inch deep furrow
> > Set bulbs into furrow
> > Use a rake or wide hoe to cover furrow
> > Mulch heavily with straw
>
> I've been doing it this way for the last few years and last year planted
> ~150lbs of garlic with this method.
>
> Andy
>
> Richard Robinson wrote:
>> Any recommendations for tools and techniques for planting large 
>> quantities of garlic? I hope to graduate from planting 50 cloves to more 
>> like 500, and wonder if there's a better way than hands and knees with a 
>> trowel. This will be a combination of softneck and stiffneck.
>>
>> thanks.
>>
>>  --
>>  Richard Robinson
>>  http://www.nasw.org/users/rrobinson/
>>
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>>
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