Featured Recipes: • Creamy Tomato, Bacon and Blue Cheese Linguine • Garlic Croutons • Our Favorite Pesto Sauce • Savory Chicken Roll-ups Gardening Tips: Planting Garlic Prepare and Planting Plant in your garlic bulbs in a fertile, well-drained soil. Prepare your bed by turning under or tilling in compost or well-rotted manure. Separate the cloves and plant each individual clove, root end down. Plant shallots 1” deep, 4-6” apart in 18” spaced rows roots side down, just deep enough so that the tip lies level with the soil surface. Garlic will form a cluster of 5-24 cloves around the original garlic. Do not use mulch as it may rot bulbs, which are not strong enough to push through mulch. After planting garlic, water well or lightly in heavy soils, and only water again when the soil is dry. Remember, garlic love water and food, but they must have good drainage or the bulbs will rot. In the Spring, feed the garlic with either composted manure or a well-balanced fertilizer before the bulbs begin to enlarge. Keep the bulbs well watered and weeded; they grow best with at least 1" of water per week. Remove any seed stalks that form to focus the garlics' energy into forming cloves. Garlic should be Spring planted in very cold areas. Harvesting & Storage A few weeks before harvesting stop watering the garlic. Different growers have different rules of thumb regarding the best time to harvest: when the lower leaves are half to three-quarters brown when the plants are 40% brown, 60% green. The dying back of the leaves is only an approximate indicator. Inspect a few bulbs in the ground by carefully scraping away the dirt. Pull the garlic from the ground when the bulb has reached a good size and before the wrappers begin to deteriorate or the bulbs begin to split open. If a bulb is not well-wrapped, and the skins on the cloves are not intact, the garlic will not keep well. Learning exactly when to stop watering and when to harvest is a matter of judgment that comes with experience. Use a flat, narrow-bladed shovel to loosen the ground beside the garlic and pull the plants by hand. Be careful as garlic bruises easily. Regardless of what you read elsewhere, do not leave your garlic in the sun to cure, because they might sunburn and rot. Store your garlic in mesh bags (like onion sacks) in a cool dry area.. You should let the bulbs dry for about a month. They can be stored for up to 8 months for soft neck garlic and just a few months for hardneck garlic if kept at their optimum storage temperature of 35°-45°F.