How to plant Garlic ?

Garlic greens are another popular indoor gardening choice. Garlic is highly nutritious with a myriad of reported benefits, including its cancer-fighting properties. Garlic greens make a good choice for growing indoors as it allows them to be grown off-season and preserves the freshness and the flavor of the harvested garlic, which can diminish when shipped in from abroad during off-season periods.

Garlic is not grown from seeds, but rather the individual cloves, which are harvested from a bulb. Although you can attempt to use bulbs of garlic bought from a supermarket in order to plant, it is best to buy bulbs directly from a gardening centre. Supermarket garlic is treated with chemical sprays in order to prevent them from sprouting, which will reduce the likelihood that your garlic will flourish.

Although garlic does still require a supply of light, it prefers cooler and darker environments compared to most plants. Therefore garlic can make a good choice if you south-facing windows or sunny places within your house. Garlic needs a suitable depth of soil to grow within – aim for at least eight inches, if not slightly more. Multiple garlic plants can be grown within the same container, although they need a considerable amount of space apart; around four inches for each plant.

To plant the garlic, break the bulb up into separate cloves. There is no need to peel the cloves, simply plant them vertically within the soil, with the tip of each clove approximately 1-inch deep away from the surface the soil or your chosen growing medium. It should take around 1-week for your garlic cloves to germinate and reach the surface of the soil, but it should take 2-3 more weeks for these sprouts to develop into healthy, sizeable stems.

The garlic will eventually start to grow flowers. These should be trimmed and removed to ensure that all energy and growth is directed towards the stem and bulbs rather than wasted. After around 3-4 weeks, you can start to clip the tips of the sprouts with scissors to harvest rings to use in recipes that require green garlic. After numerous clippings the sprouts will no longer grow from the garlic cloves in which case the container should be emptied and new bulbs planted in fresh soil.

Alternatively, if you wish to harvest the garlic bulbs themselves, then you should not clip the greens as they grow but rather allow the plant to gently grow over the course of 8-10 months, once the leaves have started to brown and wither. After this time period you can harvest the garlic by pulling the plants up from the ground and placing the bulbs in a dry warm place for approximately a week in order to dry them out.

However growing garlic bulbs indoors this way is not recommended, although it is possible – it is more practical to grow garlic bulbs outdoors. Garlic needs to be watered regularly, but the soil should always be damp rather than waterlogged.