In this 20‑minute tutorial Nicole Johnsey Burke, a professional gardener and author, explains how to turn a few garlic bulbs into a lifelong supply. She begins by contrasting garlic’s perennial‑like growth with onions and chives, then outlines the essential timing: plant garlic 4–6 weeks before the first frost (or 1–2 weeks after) so the cold triggers bulb formation. She advises buying certified organic seed garlic and choosing varieties based on USDA zone – hardneck for zones ≤ 6 (colder, produces scapes, stores 6–9 months) and softneck for zones ≥ 7 (no scapes, stores 9–12 months). Soil preparation uses her “103 mix” (topsoil, compost, coarse sand) plus a 2–3‑inch compost top‑dressing. Nicole demonstrates companion planting, placing a garlic row among broccoli, radishes, peas, herbs, kale, and Swiss chard to avoid a barren bed for months. Planting details include 3–4 in depth, 3–6 in spacing, tip up, root end down, and leaving the skin on. The core of the “lifetime supply” concept is a simple math: plant ~62 cloves to harvest ~60 bulbs, consume 52 for the year, and save 8–10 bulbs for re‑planting the next fall, creating a self‑sustaining cycle. She shows how a 4 × 4 ft (16 sq ft) bed can hold the required 60 cloves using staggered rows, proving the method works even in small spaces. Throughout she references a free downloadable garlic growing guide and a fall‑planting video for further learning. The tone is conversational and enthusiastic, with clear step‑by‑step instructions and practical tips for gardeners of any experience level.
Chapters
5 cloves of garlic can give you a lifetime supply, but how do you grow it so that it lasts forever? Garlic is in the onion family, which includes things like chives and scallions and onions and also garlic. Now, chives are a perennial plant. They start in the garden, grow up through the growing season, die back in the winter, and then they come back every single year. Onions grow entirely differently. You start from a seed, get a full onion by the end of the season, and then you have to start completely from scratch the very next year. The way garlic grows is totally different, and because you're watching this video, you're going to know how to start with just a few bulbs and grow a lifetime supply of garlic just from what's here in my hand. In case we haven't met, I'm Nicole Burke. I have been growing in clients' gardens since 2015. I've written 3 books on gardening, and garlic was one of the first things that I mastered in my garden. So because you're watching today's video, you're going to know how to take these bulbs and grow a lifetime supply in the same way that I do. When you subscribe to the Gardenary channel, you're going to get new video from me every single week, and I'll put a link right below this video for when you subscribe so that we can send you some free planting plans to help you out in your garden next season. So let's get into the step-by-step on how to turn this much garlic into a lifetime supply. So the catch with garlic is the timing. Garlic has to go in the ground in the fall so that it is under the soil when the soil freezes. That drop in cold temperature, it tells each of these cloves that it needs to split and grow an entire bulb rather than just giving you one Really large clove. So garlic needs to be planted in the ground 4 to 6 weeks before your first frost, or you can stretch it and plant 1 to 2 weeks after your first frost. The next crazy thing about garlic is how long it takes to grow. As soon as the soil starts to warm up in early spring, you'll get these little green shoots growing out of your garlic clove, and then about 9 months after you planted your garlic in the ground, you're going to dig up an entire big bulb of garlic. So here in Nashville, I plant around October, early November, and then I start digging my bulbs around the middle or end of June. Now the cool thing is garlic can store for 9 to 12 months indoors. Before you run to the grocery store to buy a bunch of garlic, let me give you a little bit of instruction. Number one, we want to buy seed garlic, and I highly recommend either buying it from a farmer's market in your local town or ordering online from a preferred organic garlic grower. You do want to be sure you're getting a certified organic garlic head. Then it's time to choose If you're in a colder climate, you want to prefer hardneck varieties. These are going to have less cloves per bulb, and they actually store a little bit less time, about 6 to 9 months, but they will give you garlic scapes, and they are made to prefer colder temperatures. Then you have softneck varieties. These are typically the ones you're going to find in a grocery store. They will not grow a scape, and they will last more like 9 to 12 months in storage. So if you are zone 6 or below, you want to go for a hardneck variety, and then if you're zone 7 or above, you want to go for softneck. I'm here here in zone 7A or B, so I can actually grow both, and you may be able to do that in your zone too. So once you've picked out your varieties of garlic, then you're ready to start planting. Step number 1 is to prep your soil. I love using my 103 mix. That's topsoil, compost, and coarse sand all mixed together. I'll link my soil recipe below. And then right before planting, I like to add about 2 to 3 inches of compost right to the top. We did that a few weeks ago before we planted for the fall season, and then you just want to be sure that soil is nice and loose and ready for your garlic cloves to go in. Now, some people like to plant their garlic in a bed all by themselves, but I love to do companion planting, and I personally don't want a garden that is just full of a plant I can't harvest until next June. That's way too long to wait to get a harvest out of the bed, in my opinion. So I'm going to plant my lines of garlic right along my other plants. I've got broccoli in here. I've got radishes and peas, loads of herbs and flowers, kale, Swiss I'm going to just put my line of garlic right in the middle here, and that way I'm not sitting looking at a boring bed until next summer. I'm going to be planting elephant garlic, which is a very large clove. You want to bury your cloves about 3 to 4 inches deep, and then you want your cloves to be about 3 to 6 inches apart. If you read the instructions online, most are going to say 6 inches, but I like to squeeze mine a little bit more than that, so I'm actually going to use my Gardenary dibber for both measurements. First, I'll use it to get my 4-inch depth hole, and then I'll use it to measure the distance between that and the next hole. And I'm just going to go down all the way along the line and make my holes before I start to separate my garlic cloves and put them in. Now, the magic to having garlic that will last your whole life is the math, and we're going to work through that math as soon as we get this garlic all planted up. So you are going to take your entire bulb, of garlic like this, and you're going to break it into individual cloves. This hardneck— the hardnecks are going to be the easiest to separate, and you can see because you've still got this hardneck here right in the center, so that kind of makes it so simple to break these cloves apart. And as you can see with a hardneck variety, the cloves are huge. They're so much bigger than your softneck variety. So you're going to take a clove, and you want the tip to be pointed up, and then that space on the bottom that had the little roots coming out of it, that's going to go down in the soil. Kind of, it's pretty intuitive how you're going to do this, and then you're just going to place your clove right inside that hole that you just dug, making sure it's a good 3 or so inches from the surface of the soil. And that's how it goes, one clove for every hole. And I like to place my cloves, all of them in place, before I start to cover any of them up with soil. And you can see how huge This particular clove is— it's basically half of the entire bulb. It's gigantic. So we put each of those into one hole, and you can leave the skin on. You don't want to strip the skin. This is a protective layer for the garlic, keeps it from rotting, and will help it stay healthy through the winter. So I've got 4 in the first set of holes, and then you'll just keep planting all the way down your line. Before I get there, we do have a complete garlic growing guide, and you can get it for free right below this video. It gives you the step-by-step everything I'm talking through here, but in a little document that you can read and bring out to the garden with you. So I'll link that right below this video. I'm going to be covering up the garlic as I talk, and all that I'm doing is just literally pushing the compost right over the top of the garlic. And you do want to be sure that you get yourself a plant tag and you mark the row. Otherwise, you're going to plant over this with some radishes or spinach or something like that in early spring, and it'll be a mess. So make sure you mark the row with a plant tag. Now let's talk about the math of how you're never going to run out of garlic after you plant this way. So let's say your family eats about 1 garlic full bulb a week, all right? So that's going to be 52 bulbs a year that your family would need. So what I want you to do this year is you're going to plant 62 cloves. So just as I've outlined all these cloves here, I think I have about 8 or 10. You're going to do this 6 times over. So 62 cloves of garlic are going to go in the ground right now. Now, Some of them are going to rot and not, you know, grow into the full bulb, but most of them will. Go to June of next year, and you're going to have 60 bulbs of garlic. 60! Can you believe it? Just from planting a few of these cloves. So you're going to harvest all 60 of those bulbs, and you're going to set aside 52 that your family is going to enjoy over the next year. If you grew hardneck varieties, you'll want to enjoy those sooner rather than later, and you'll be eating your own homegrown garlic for an entire year. So you'll set aside 52, but those Those other, say, 8 or 10 bulbs, you're gonna save those, put those away. You're gonna store them in a cool, dry place that doesn't get direct sunlight on it, and you're just gonna let that garlic sit until right about this time next year. So next fall, you'll take those 8 or so bulbs of garlic that you grew starting now and bring them out to the garden, and you'll do this all over again. You'll break those 8 bulbs up into, say, 60 more cloves, and then you'll plant out those 60 cloves, and then guess what? That next June, 2 years from now, you'll have another set of 60 bulbs that can feed your family for an entire year. You'll set apart the 8 or so bulbs that you don't need to eat, and then you'll plant again that fall, and on and on and on it goes. And if you think you don't have enough room to fit 60 bulbs of garlic, let me show you how this could work in a very small little garden bed. This is a 4x4 bed, which is 16 square feet, and I've already set out the rows for garlic here. Each row has 6 holes, I've got 2 rows that are staggered just like this. Even in this one row of 4 square feet, I can plant 12 cloves of garlic, and I can do that 4 or 5 times over just in this one bed, which would easily fit all 60 of the cloves I need to grow. So if you've got 16 square feet of space anywhere in your yard, then you can absolutely grow enough garlic to last your family for the rest of your life. Now garlic is just one of the things that I love to grow in the fall, and I just planted up most of my garden for the fall season. Seasons. If you want to see the best things to plant right alongside your garlic so you don't have to wait till the summer to get your first harvest, you can watch the entire step-by-step fall planting guide right here.
