- Lift all garlic now, gently remove as much soil as possible, and cure. Cure by hanging them with their stems intact and roots left on. Hang for 2 weeks out of direct sunlight, ideally with some air passing over them (consider a fan, and think about places like a carport, shed, under a deck...) Make sure no 2 garlic bulbs are touching each other while curing.
- Once cured, trim roots short, cut stem off, put in paper bags in a cool place with fairly good humidity (e.g. 50% or better, if possible). If you can't get that humidity, wet the top of the paper bags a little (not to where the wet touches the garlic). Check once a week and remove any that rot, and to re-wet the bags.
- Plant again in the fall, ideally, 2 weeks before your first hard frost. Consider bone meal or some other potassium in your soil 2 weeks before you plant your garlic, as well as some form of nitrogen supplement (2 years old if its manure). I plant in late October.
- Cover your planted area with some form of mulch, or even garden cloth. You want to keep as many weed spores out of there as possible in the spring, so mulching in fall serves that purpose well. Plants may appear above the soil this fall, don't worry about it, that growth can die off from frost and the plant is no worse for wear. However, removing the mulch (if its restrictive, like ground cloth) should be done before the plants break soil.
- Keep well weeded, give it a middling amount of water throughout the growing season (e.g. up to the middle of June.), and fertilize with a high potassium fertilizer that won't kill your green stalks. Watering depends greatly on so many things its hard to give advice, but you don't want to promote bulb rot, yet you don't want it to get so dry that the leaves pre-maturely die off.
- If growing hard neck varieties (those that put up a scape, e.g. a garlic flower), cut the scape off before it makes a 2nd full turn. Cut close above the last set of leaves on the stalk. (btw, it is a great food to eat, I turn it into pesto, but you can eat it as you would beans or asparagus, raw or cooked.) If you can, let a couple of scapes survive. Taking the scape off tells the plant to put all attention into the bulb. However, the flower creates "bulbils", or mini-garlic clones. They are actually more true forms of the garlic than the cloves are, but take 3 years to become a full bulb. Always plant a few every year, and a few of their progeny every year, as this will re-vitalize your garlic strain.
- If the stalk gets brown at the ground, pull, your ground is too wet. Stalk should die back from top to bottom, pull garlic when the stalk is 2/3's died back. (usually towards the end of July, but it depends based on where you are.)
- Start at #1 again.
And of course always enjoy garlic in everything you can get it into. Having eaten garlic, you are the poster child for all those places that say they are "fragrance free zones".
BTW, if you have clay soils, or soils that don't hold water well, consider Jersey Greensand as an additive. 100% organic and infuses more than 30 micro-organisms into your soil.
