Spring is the time to plant most -- but not all -- vegetables. Take garlic, for instance. It's one of the easiest vegetables to grow, yet it isn't a common sight in most Twin Cities gardens. That's probably because of its odd preference for being planted right after the first frost in the fall.
Garlic isn't like other vegetables. In addition to being planted in the fall, it's grown from a bulb, not a seed. In fact, garlic is never planted from seed because it rarely sets any seeds.
The garlic you buy in the grocery store is actually a collection of small bulbs, which we call cloves. If you wanted to, you could buy some garlic at the grocery store and plant the cloves (pointy side up) and by next July you'd have a crop of garlic. But Minnesotan gardeners can choose from a much wider range of garlic, most of which comes from California or China.
Garlic types
According to Carl Rosen, a garlic expert at the University of Minnesota, there are two basic types of garlic: softneck and hardneck.
Softneck garlic, the kind you'd find in a supermarket, tends to have a greater number of smaller cloves. Hardneck garlic has fewer, larger cloves. Some gardeners prefer softneck garlic because its stem lends itself to braiding, but hardneck garlic grows a little better in Minnesota.
Best varieties
If you plant cloves of garlic from a bulb you've purchased at a grocery or farmer's market, you won't know exactly what kind of garlic you'll be getting. So it's a better idea to buy garlic cloves from a garden center. If you're interested in braiding garlic, Rosen recommends the softneck varieties Silver White and Inchelium Red. The best hardneck varieties include Music, Siberian and Chesnok Red.
