First Time Garlic Success!

Many gardeners told me that garlic couldn't be done in the bay area. We have so many microclimates here, I am always hesitant to believe anything until i try it myself. In November, I spotted a garlic workshop held at the Garden for the Environment in SF so I quickly signed up. What I learned there was that garlic does well in the bay area. We just can't get the spicy heat of the heirloom garlics because we don't get a cold snap.

I was given some heirloom garlic bulbs from Peaceful Valley Nursery. I would have bought more from Seeds of Change but they were sold out by then. I did plant some store bought organic bulbs to see how they would do.


The general rule of thumb for planting garlic bulbs is to put in ground around Thanksgiving and pull up around Fourth of July. The leaves should be browning around the 4th which is an indicator.


I planted in both 1 gallon containers and directly into the ground. I've had problems with onions getting too soggy b/c of the clay soil so I wanted to hedge my bets by doing it both ways.

All of the container garlic turned brown so I pulled them up. The ones planted in soil still had green leaves so I only pulled up a few. As you can see in the picture, the container ones had much smaller bulbs than soil. Garlic appears to want to root deeply. The roots were hanging out the bottom of my containers. Next year everything is going into the ground!

I left about 1/2 of the garlic in the ground to see what happens if i leave in an extra week or two.

I didn't get enough garlic to last me through the year but I'll have plenty to make pesto with throughout the summer. I'm not too worried about curing this time around since it wont last into the winter. All I did with the fresh garlic is place outside on a table so the outer skin can dry a bit.

BTW, the garlic tastes just as good as what I receive in our CSA box! And I didn't notice any difference between store bought bulbs versus seed bulbs