When to plant garlic?
- Botanical name
- Allium sativum
- Family
- Amaryllidaceae
Garlic is planted outdoors from October to November, 3 cm deep. It is harvested from June to July.
Garlic is a perennial plant. The edible parts are the bulbs, leaves and flowers.
Garlic does not grow from seed. What is planted is a clove, a piece of the mother plant, and it goes straight into the bed where it will also grow. The bed under it is taken all winter, so there is no room there for another vegetable until lifting.
Most varieties need a longer cold period, or they form no bulb at all. The clove has to root before the ground freezes.
Watering is for dry spells only, while the bulb is growing. Once it is formed the watering stops, or the bulb rots. It is lifted when the leaves turn yellow. Left in the ground too long, the bulb falls apart and is no good for storing.
Garlic through the year
- outdoor planting
- harvest
In short
The first frost is not on the same day everywhere, so the recorded weeks are a guide and not a date.
Growing conditions
The bulbs, leaves and flowers are listed as edible and as toxic at once. The toxicity is to cats and dogs, not to people.
Is garlic toxic to cats and dogs?
Yes. Toxic to cats and dogs, toxic parts: roots, bulbs, stems, leaves and flowers.
Companions in the bed
Companion planting is tradition and not an agronomic claim. What is recorded is which pairs sources recommend and which they advise against.
A row of garlic is set among the lettuce against visiting game.
A row of garlic is set among the potatoes against visiting game.
- “Cited” means the pair is named by one source or two.
Pests and diseases
Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.
- Signs
- Growth is stunted and the leaves yellow and die. Pulled up, the underground part is coated in a white to grey mould or crust holding thousands of tiny black fruiting bodies.
- Prevention
- Plant only stock confirmed healthy. Pull out infected plants and take them away, not onto the compost. The fruiting bodies stay in the soil for years, so do not plant alliums in an infected bed for four to five years. Rotation on its own does not wipe the disease out. Never plant garlic bought at a grocery shop.
- What to do
- For the home garden there is no product. The measure is the bed: remove the infected plants, work compost into the soil and leave a long break without alliums.
Keep track of your plants with Tendask
Log the task and set a reminder for the next one. Every plant keeps its own history, so there is nothing to guess at.
Related plants
The plants below are in the same botanical family (Amaryllidaceae).
Sources about the plant: ASPCA Toxic and Non-Toxic Plants, Clemson Cooperative Extension, CliniTox Pflanzengifte, GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, KGZS Kmetijsko gozdarska zbornica Slovenije, KGZS Zavod Ljubljana, KGZS Zavod Nova Gorica, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Royal Horticultural Society, Smernice za strokovno utemeljeno gnojenje (Mihelič et al., MKGP 2011), Utah State University Extension, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 28 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: EPPO Global Database, University of Maryland Extension.