Planting garlic in November: cloves in the ground before winter

November is the last call for autumn garlic. Whites and violets — the autumn strains — must be in the ground before December: planted now, they root quietly through winter and give full bulbs at the July harvest. Miss the window and you switch to pink garlic… in spring.

Which garlic to plant in autumn

Not all garlics behave the same. The corpus is formal: white and violet garlics are the autumn garlics, planted October-November. Pink garlic waits for spring (February-March). The planting stock is the clove — taken from a healthy, well-formed bulb, separated the very day of planting.

• Choose the biggest outer cloves — they give the best bulbs; keep the small inner ones for the kitchen.
• Soil: light, deep, drained, sunny. Garlic hates wet feet: on heavy ground, plant on a small ridge or in a raised bed.
• Set cloves upright, point up, covered by about 2 cm of soil — not deeper, autumn garlics dislike burial.
• Spacing: 25 cm between rows, 15 cm in the row (the dedicated garlic chapter's figures).

Winter care: almost nothing

That is the charm of the autumn garlic: once planted, it asks for almost nothing. Weed what emerges, and that is it — no watering needed in a normal winter, no mulch (alliums hate it: humidity at the collar invites rot). The cloves root slowly and the first green points show by late winter.

Harvest: July, when the foliage yellows

The signal is simple: lift when the foliage turns yellow, usually in July. Pull gently with a fork on a dry day, let the bulbs dry on the ground a few hours if the weather allows, then finish drying under cover, airy and shaded. Do not wash the bulbs.

Storage: how long each type keeps

An honest figure from the corpus: white and violet garlics keep roughly until February; pink garlic keeps longer, potentially to May-June. Braided or netted, in a cool dry ventilated room — never in the fridge. If you need garlic that lasts to spring, that is one more reason to plant pink in February too.

November is also the right month to protect what stays in the ground: winter mulching, material by material — but keep it away from your garlic row.

Also read: which vegetables can wait in the ground all winter — garlic is planted now but harvested in summer.

Growing calendar