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By mid February the purple stripe is over a foot tall with 5-6 leaves showing.  The darker porcelains in the distance are a few inches shorter with fewer leaves showing.

We put a half-inch layer of fresh compost from Net Zero (they lease space on John’s farm) shortly after planting.  These are the porcelain beds on a frosty December morning. The warm compost created a steam cloud on the frozen soil.  The compost is weed free and lasts several months before the wind and rain wash it away of break it down.

We add another layer in late March to early April as the last feeding before the plants start forming scapes in May.  We use compost as a mulch and a food source and it does help hold some weeds down.

Compost mulch also improves the tilth or composition of the soil and helps break down clay patches.  This soil is  like chocolate cake to work in.  It crumbles easily, the worm feed on the compost and stay inside the raised beds adding their natural fertilizer to the soil.

Compost (or any similar mulch) makes weeding and harvesting much easier as well.

In our wet Zone 8 climate it is vital to plant your garlic in raised beds. Garlic is sensitive to having their roots in water so your soil must drain well.  Sandy soil is fine but is lacks organics and without compost or other natural fertilizers the garlic size will suffer.

Our soil is black loam with some clay in patches.  Field drainage is crucial and raised beds keep our plants out of sitting water.  Even a few days of saturated soil will reduce your garlic harvest.

Here are two short test beds where we used different grades of craft paper as weed blocks.  Both beds have compost as a mulch cover.  You can see the finished product on the left side of the brown paper bed.

The white paper lasted longer and we had only a fraction of the weeds seen in all the other beds,  The brown craft paper broke down a little faster than the white and the weeds came through a little more but both attempts worked well.

We simple planted through the compost and paper in our regular planting pattern of about 8 inches of space in all directions.

November 2014 we began planting over 8,000 Porcelain hardnecks in raised beds.  Notice how tall the purple stripes are that were planted three weeks earlier on the right.  They are already showing 3-4 leaves!  It was a very mild fall.

We have learned raised beds are mandatory if you want to grow large garlic in our wet climate.

Oct 15-18 we planted 2,500 purple stripe hardnecks.  Here is a raised bed already amended with compost and worm-castings.  The plants are generously spaced about 8″ apart each way allowing for easy access with a dutch hoe once the weeds start in the spring.