If you ask me, garlic’s a bit of a funny crop—long, grass-like stalks above ground giving us the false impression that we can grow them close together. Obviously, given what we harvest, that’s not the case. Plant these guys all clumped together, and garlic will simply choose not to produce any bulbs. Instead, it’ll actually grow much like chives or green onions. And that’s why we’re so diligent about spacing these guys.
We spaced them four inches apart minimum at planting so that come harvest time, we’re digging up nice big bulbs full of that garlic flavor we love. Okay, but there has to be some gray area. What if we gave the garlic some space, just not unlimited space? Would the bulbs continue to grow to an acceptable size, or would they stay too small to harvest? And if the bulbs still did grow and swell, would the sum harvest of the extra plants in a defined area exceed that of the well-spaced ones? Meaning, if we dry, clean, cure, and weigh the smaller but more numerous garlic harvest, would it be more or less bounty than the giant bulbs that we normally get?
Clearly, these are questions that need to be answered, and today we’ll give it our best try. Luckily, ten plus months ago, I planned ahead.
Look, I’m as diligent and regimented in my garlic planting as anyone, but after growing it for the last 10 plus years, I’ve seen it all, and I’ve come to learn that it never hurts to experiment and it never hurts to try something new. So today, let’s put our garlic spacing to the test.
For those of you that don’t know or maybe you’ve never worked with it, garlic is a crop that is planted and grown from itself. That is right before your first fall frost, the individual cloves from that year’s harvest are planted and left dormant over the cold winter. In the spring, they sprout, and the early summer brings it all to an end with an epic harvest. And to bring it all full circle, the cycle continues that coming fall.
With such a standard basic planting, spacing is easy, and we get these lovely uniform rows because of it. However, unlike tomatoes or peppers, garlic is never pruned. And unlike carrots or beets, it’s also never thinned to create spacing; what you plant is what you get. Which is no problem because even in little herb planters like this, you can grow epic bulbs of garlic, and container growing as a whole produces some of the best yields. But even in containers, I’ve always observed the spacing rules: four inches between each clove and two inches away from the sides. It’s always worked, and I’ve never questioned it. That is until today—well, actually about 10 months ago when last fall, I planted garlic in these two identical planter boxes. They’re each four feet wide, six inches deep, and six inches across. I planted them on the same day, using the same soil, using the same source of cloves. They’ve sat here side by side enduring all the elements together for the last 304 days. The only difference is I planted these guys using four-inch spacing, and I planted these guys using two inches or less. At double the concentration of spacing, the garlic bulbs in this planter should be far smaller. But the only way to know for sure is to harvest these guys, so I think it’s time to finally dig them up.
My justification for even trying out spacing is simple: on the off chance that we can develop more garlic in a given region and get generally similar size bulbs, then, at that point, that is enormous. From planting to harvest, garlic takes nearly a year to grow. Any benefit that we can get to limit the bed space it takes up can immensely affect the general efficiency of the nursery. It was obvious to at least try, and growing more garlic is always better in the end.
Okay, time to dig. Remember when you’re harvesting your garlic, don’t pull it up from the stem; really get down into the dirt and loosen those roots. For these little bed planters, it’s gonna be too hard to get a shovel in here, so I’m gonna have to dig with my hands. Eventually, the bulb’s gonna break free, and it comes up quite easy.
Now that I’ve got the technique down, I can make short work of these guys.
I’m gonna go ahead and trim the roots and stems just for ease of working with them for now. But to get an accurate weight comparison for each yield, we’re gonna have to come up with a bit of a standard across all bulbs.
Normally, right after the harvest, we wouldn’t be doing anything like this with the garlic; it would be hung up to dry here for at least a month before we started to clean it. But for the purpose of this experiment, all those roots and dead foliage would have introduced way too many variables to accurately measure their respective yields. So I’m going to cut them down right to the base of the stem, top of the bulb, and then trim all the roots.
Okay, there we go—all cleaned up to a set standard for ease of comparison. Time to weigh these guys and analyze the data.
First up, for the properly spaced bulbs, we had four of them weighing in at 316 grams. That gave us an average weight of 79 grams per bulb, with the largest being 83 grams. Next, for the smaller, tightly spaced garlic, we had eight bulbs total weighing in at 328 grams. This gave us an average weight of 41 grams per bulb, with the largest one coming in at 44 grams. Interestingly enough, three of them came in at that weight. Wow, that is pretty interesting data. I mean, essentially identical harvests, double the bulbs for the smaller ones, but at basically half the size; it was the same yield. Not super surprising when I was first eyeballing them, but I didn’t expect the ratio to be so uniformly accurate.
For the extra time, expense, and amount of seed stock used, it simply doesn’t make sense to plant the bulbs closer together from a yield standpoint. And really, neither from a space standpoint. It seems like a given square area is gonna produce a given yield weight, regardless of the number of bulbs. And that’s kind of amazing when you think about it. So, across the board, I think that four-inch standard spacing for garlic is looking pretty good right now. Other than market farmers who are maybe selling by the bulb, tighter garlic spacing just doesn’t make sense.
It took 10 months to accomplish, but now we know—interesting stuff.
