Thick socks. Steaming soup. A warm spot by the heater. A crop of garlic in the ground. These are the stuff of wintertime cozy feelings. Like having meat in the freezer, or jars of peaches in the pantry, garlic in the ground equals food security, long before it pokes above the ground.
As you lounge about in socially distant isolation upon the sofa, you look up from the seed catalog mid-perusal and attempt to ponder life from the perspective of your garlic cloves, planted back in the fall before the ground froze. Activated by the moist soil, they began sending out roots from the cells around the scab at the bottom of each clove.
Come spring, a green shoot will emerge from each tip. Before you know it, your neighbors will feel inadequate because your garlic is knee-high by the fourth of May, by which time their radishes have barely sprouted.
A deep feeling of superiority takes energy to maintain, also known as calories, so you head to the kitchen to put some of last year’s garlic to work. You decide upon a plate of spaghetti, a timeless meal that displays the full range of garlic. I often add garlic at multiple junctures during the cooking. Raw garlic adds a bright spice, while cooked garlic adds a pungent sweetness.
Growing Garlic
Garlic growing is a four-season practice. During the late summer months after the garlic harvest, when there isn’t even a crop in the ground, the garlic grower nonetheless is at work. I tarped my garlic patch in August. By November, the soil turned over like soft butter.In the fall, you’re planting and tucking them in, and in winter you’re waiting and eating the summer’s harvest. In spring, you’re weeding and watering, and in summer you’re harvesting and tarping again.
Planting garlic in the fall is part of the larger project of putting the garden to bed, and one of many winterization chores to complete before the cold blows in for the duration of winter. Your first time, it may feel unusual to be digging and planting in the dirt while the autumn leaves are blowing around. It’s oddly optimistic to be planting, even as the gray cold builds.
In addition to keeping me in close contact with the earth, planting garlic has also forged an unlikely reunion with my high-school algebra. Remember how we always used to complain that we were never going to use our algebra? Well, I went ahead and proved us wrong. I didn’t set out to derive an equation out of thin air. I was just trying to figure out how much garlic to plant.
My equation can do that for you, too, provided you have a sense of your daily garlic consumption, and you have chosen the garlic you wish to plant. Ideally you have the garlic in front of you, and can palpate the bulbs of a few heads and calculate a quick average number of cloves per bulb. Most quality varieties have between four and eight cloves per bulb. Any more than that and the cloves are too tiny.
“Y” divided by (“Z” minus one) equals “X.”
That’s it. That’s my equation. And if that’s not algebra I don’t know what is. Don’t ask me how I figured it out. My work was scribbled on a note pad outside of a second-hand store in Silverton, Colorado. But it works!
We solve it for X, the number of bulbs you should buy, where Y is the number of bulbs you wish to eat per year, and Z equals the average number of cloves per bulb.
How to Plant Your Garlic
The ideal window for planting is between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Too early and the cloves will start to grow too much, and risk being frozen out by winter. Too late and the ground will be frozen and you won’t get anything in.Plant your cloves about six inches apart in soft, fluffy soil. The scab side, from which the roots will sprout, goes down, with an inch of dirt remaining between the upper tip of the garlic clove and the surface of the earth.
After it’s all planted and raked in, mulch the garlic with small deciduous leaves or straw (not hay, which has seeds). This layer will help insulate the dormant garlic through the winter, and regulate its temperature and moisture level when spring finally arrives. Leaves are probably superior because they will decompose, increasing the microbial activity on the soil surface, which improves fertility. But broad leaves like maple can form a mat that can be difficult for the young garlic sprouts to penetrate in spring, so you will need to pull them off in March so the garlic can make it up.
After planting, give it a good soak—or simply plant it before a soaking rain. The moisture will activate the cloves to start sending out roots, in preparation for the spring growth spurt.
Pasta With Garlic
- 1 pound pasta
- 2 cloves garlic, pressed or similarly macerated
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- Optional: grated hard cheese like Parmesan
Toss the hot noodles with garlic and olive oil and, if using, the grated cheese. Proceed with whatever sauce you had planned. Perhaps a marinara that began with garlic in oil with oregano. Whatever the final destination, you’ll be glad the noodles have garlic on them.
