How to process garlic before planting

The advantage of planting spring garlic

There are two types of garlic: spring and winter. Spring garlic must be planted in open ground in the spring in mid-April. Garlic reproduces both through cloves and seeds. Among the advantages of culture, the following features should be noted:

• a head of garlic can contain up to 30 cloves of various sizes; • spring garlic has a long shelf life; • seeds germinate quickly and can be stored for 10 months without reducing their characteristics; • cloves of various sizes can be used for planting; • the greens of the crop are often used to make salads.

Spring garlic is divided into a large number of varieties. Each gardener has an individual approach to choosing a variety, depending on the region of residence.

Selection and preparation of cloves

How to prepare garlic for planting? The process begins with a visual inspection of the selected heads . It is recommended to use last year's harvest for sowing. We select the best and largest healthy bulbs. Species with bluish or pinkish husk are preferable. Those that are not overdried will germinate faster.

Important! The heads must be clean, without signs of rot or any damage.

Spring garlic is planted either as individual cloves or as whole heads. For planting, it is better to use varieties that meet certain climatic conditions.

The cloves are selected and separated from the head immediately before planting , otherwise the bottom can be overdried, which will significantly delay germination. Carefully separate each element from the head. It is important that there is no damage to the husk, lower or upper edge of the tooth. If you come across a large onion, but its cloves are small, it is better not to use such material for sowing.

The next stage is calibration . We sort the teeth and sort them by size (we will plant them in the same way).

Garlic processing

To reduce the risk of diseases, garlic must be treated with special solutions before planting; this type of disinfection will also remove pest larvae that can accumulate throughout the winter.

Manganese solution

To treat planting material, it is necessary to use a light solution of manganese. The peeled slices must be placed in liquid and left for 20 minutes. After the time has expired, drain the water and place the product on a paper towel. The solution that remains after processing the garlic can be used to disinfect the beds.

Saline solution

Salt has the property of removing pest larvae that may be hiding in the husk. To prepare a working solution, just add a tablespoon of salt to a liter of water. The resulting solution is poured into a deep container where the garlic is placed. Leave the planting material for 20 minutes, then drain the water. After disinfection, it is necessary to immediately plant it in open ground.

Copper sulfate

The substance is effective against a large number of diseases. To use, you need to prepare a light solution and place the garlic for 15 minutes. After disinfection, plant in open ground.

Copper sulfate and salt

Before planting, garlic is processed in two stages in solutions of salt and copper sulfate:

Dissolve 1 tablespoon of table salt in one and a half liters of water. Soak and soak the garlic cloves for 2 minutes.
Copper sulfate for processing is diluted in 2.5 liters of water - ¼ tablespoon. A bag of garlic cloves is placed in it for 1 minute.

Treatment with such solutions is carried out immediately before planting.

How to properly plant garlic in open ground

In order to get a large harvest, you must observe the following growing features:

• prepare the area. For spring planting of garlic, it is recommended to prepare the site in the fall. To do this, the soil is carefully dug up and organic fertilizers are applied. In spring, the soil layer should be renewed using a rake. Make small trenches, the distance between which will be at least 30 cm. This is necessary in order to facilitate the process of caring for the beds. Also, sufficient distance between plants will promote rapid growth of bulbs;

• disinfect the bulbs;

• carefully plant the garlic in the trench; the distance between the cloves should be 10-15 cm;

• sprinkle with soil.

After the first shoots appear, it is necessary to scatter wood ash and water the crop. The next watering should be carried out only 1.5 months after planting.

After what crops is it best to plant garlic?

Winter and spring garlic will give a bountiful harvest if you choose the right place for planting .
In addition to the fact that it is advisable to make the bed on a hill and with free access to sunlight, it is extremely important what previously grew in the chosen place. There will be a good garlic harvest if the crop is planted after:

green manure;
squash and pumpkins;
cucumbers and zucchini;
40-day potatoes;
early and cauliflower;
peas, beans and beans.

It is extremely undesirable to plant garlic if carrots, turnips, herbs and spices grew in the chosen place.

Neutral crops:

late cabbage;
pepper;
tomatoes;
garlic;
beet;
eggplant;
onion.

Soaking in wood ash infusion

Whether it is worth soaking garlic in ash infusion before planting depends on when the planting takes place. Only in spring can you process garlic in an infusion of wood ash. It is prepared according to the following recipe:

pour 1 liter of hot water into 1 cup of wood ash;
when the solution has cooled and some of the ash has settled, carefully pour the top layer into a separate container;
soak the teeth for 1 hour in a light solution that was poured into another container.

You will be interested to know: When and how to plant garlic correctly in spring and autumn, care, harvesting and storage of garlic

Wood ash is a natural material that is always available in the stove. Therefore, it is available to every summer resident and is a budget option.

Spring planting rules

Experienced vegetable growers say that there are only two basic rules for planting garlic in spring:

do not rush into landing;
Don't be late boarding.

No matter how strange it may sound, it is true. Garlic is a cold-resistant crop; it can withstand low temperatures, but if you plant it in cold soil, you will have to wait a long time for the shoots to emerge; they will be weak and have slow growth. At the same time, if you plant garlic late, you may not get fully ripened heads, which means they won’t be able to be stored for long. As a rule, the bulbs of winter garlic are much larger than those of spring garlic, but the harvest of spring garlic can be successfully stored for two years. The only condition is that it must fully ripen and stop growing before harvesting. So the timing of planting is really very important.

To correctly determine the planting time, you need to know the approximate dates of summer and autumn in your region. It is best to plant the crop when the soil still contains moisture from the melting of winter snows, but has already warmed up to +5 - +8 degrees. If September is warm in your area, and the first frosts do not arrive until the second half of October, then you can take your time with planting and wait until the second or third decade of April. Before planting garlic late, the soil can be watered, as long as there is enough time for the crop to ripen.

When preparing a bed for a spicy vegetable, you must not forget about the rules of crop rotation. You cannot plant it after onions, cucumbers and carrots; garlic can only be planted in the same place after 3 years. It is best if cabbage, cauliflower or white cabbage, peas, and beans grew in the area allocated for it.

For spring planting, especially if it is early, the site must be prepared in the fall. It is dug up, freed from the roots of perennial grasses, humus or compost, superphosphate and potash fertilizers are added. Garlic loves nutritious, breathable, non-acidic soil. Therefore, there is still time in the fall to adjust the structure and acidity of the soil. Sand and wood ash are added to heavy clay soil, and lime or dolomite flour is added to too acidic soil.

What is it and why is it produced?

Treating a plant before planting is the process of disinfecting the seed or its seedlings so that in the future they can resist diseases and pests that may be in the ground where it will be placed. Absolutely clean and healthy seed is the key to a good and healthy harvest .

Care after landing

If everything was done correctly with the preparation of planting material and with the planting itself, and the weather did not throw some disgusting surprise, then in two weeks the beds should turn green. It is usually believed that the emergence of seedlings is a reason to water the beds with nitrogen-containing fertilizers, for example, a solution of chicken manure infusion. Each owner decides the advisability of fertilizing based on the degree of soil preparation before planting or its fertility.

Be that as it may, garlic responds well to the application of organic fertilizers. You just need to remember that nitrogen encourages greenery to grow, so nitrogen fertilizing should be carried out only until mid-summer, it is even better to stop it at the end of June.

When caring for garlic, a summer resident must free it from weeds, monitor the moisture of the soil, feed it, and inspect it for infection with fungal or viral diseases in order to take timely action to eliminate them.

Usually there is a period of dry heat in the summer, in such cases the beds need to be watered regularly. They do this in the evening, and the next day they make sure to loosen the soil so that it does not form a crust, and at the same time remove the weeds. Watering is stopped when the heads have reached their maximum size, then excess moisture may prevent them from ripening or even cause rotting. As a rule, watering stops in August; more precise dates vary depending on the region.

Fertilizers are applied simultaneously with watering or fertilizers are scattered (spread) between the plants. Until the end of June, nitrogen is added, and then only phosphorus and potassium. You shouldn’t get carried away with fertilizers, because their excess can accumulate in the heads and then end up on our table. If you prepare the soil well before planting, you may not need fertilizing at all or the amount will be minimal.

If the weather permits, then you should not harvest the crop immediately as soon as the leaves begin to turn yellow and fall to the ground. In September, the garlic is already ripe, it will no longer grow, but if it remains in the ground until mid-October (or at least until it begins), the harvest will be better stored. Just don’t let the frost catch it in the ground.

Harvesting is best done on a dry, cool day. The garlic is removed from the ground by hand or with the help of some tool (shovel, pitchfork), left directly on the garden bed to dry, then cleared of the soil and hung or laid out to dry before storing.

Disembarkation dates and rules, useful recommendations

When buying garlic from your hands, you may end up with the wrong variety, so it is better to buy planting material either in specialized stores or from friends. Garlic is planted 15-20 days before frost. Then its root system has time to develop before frost, but seedlings have not yet appeared. In this case, it is convenient to start from temperature. If its indicators are +10-12 °C, they begin planting. In the central part of the country, this time usually falls in mid-autumn. In the southern regions, garlic is planted a little later, but in the northern regions, on the contrary, earlier. The crop should not be planted immediately after digging the soil. The soil must have time to settle and the fertilizers to take root.

When planting, make sure that the width of the bed is 1 m. The tines are immersed in the ground, bottom down, to a depth of 8-12 cm (do not press too hard so as not to damage the roots). At the same time, a distance of 10 cm is maintained between them. Pour 1 tbsp directly onto the places where the teeth will be planted. l. sand. It will perform a drainage function and prevent rotting of the planting material. The optimal gap between rows is 20 cm. After completing the procedure, the ground is covered with peat or dry leaves. In the spring, when the vegetable heads form, remove the shoots so that they do not draw out all the juices.

Proper processing of garlic heads for planting

It is necessary to plant exactly the seed that was grown and collected in the gardener’s country . Thus, the fruit will already be fully adapted to weather conditions and soil. If you take foreign varieties for planting, it may happen that the plant simply does not sprout and dies, since the new growing conditions are not for it. For planting, good quality cloves of the spring (for planting in spring) or winter (for planting in winter) species are selected. The teeth should have a dense structure and no defects.

Garlic just before planting

There are several types of preparation for planting. To get the most out of your efforts, you need to understand how to prepare seed. By following these simple rules, the crop will be protected from parasites and will be able to grow faster. Consider these types:

Before planting a plant in the ground, it must be hardened at a temperature not exceeding +5 degrees Celsius. A shelf in the refrigerator will do. It is necessary to place the heads in the cold 2 months before you plan to plant the garlic cloves. After maintaining the temperature, the head is divided into individual cloves. This procedure should be carried out very carefully so as not to damage the integrity of the tooth.
If only seeds are available, then they too should be treated with cold before planting. The only difference is the aging time - you can keep the seeds in the refrigerator for 30 days. This procedure will allow the garlic to sprout faster and form larger heads once the garlic has sprouted. Moreover, this way the vegetable will not be afraid of the cold of winter and will not die.
Some gardeners prefer to prepare and treat garlic with special antiparasitic agents before planting. After this procedure, the garlic must be dried.

Does garlic require pre-soaking before planting?

Experienced gardeners recommend soaking the plant . However, ordinary tap water will not work in any case. To do this, you need to make a special solution that will protect the teeth from parasites during growth. After soaking, garlic grows much faster, and the fruits are large and fleshy.

It is generally customary to soak garlic in a saline solution. Ticks and other harmful insects do not tolerate table salt solution. To create such a solution you need to take 30 grams of salt and three liters of water. Soak the garlic in this solution for no more than 24 hours.

There is another effective and useful solution - a solution of potassium permanganate . The resulting solution should have a light pink tint. Soak the garlic for no more than fifteen minutes.

The disinfecting solution looks like this: dilute copper sulfate (1 teaspoon) in water (1 liter). Keep for no more than thirty minutes.

The next method is to make a solution from ash (wood ash). Half a kilogram of ash is poured with water at room temperature. The ash must first be sifted well. After infusing the solution for twenty minutes, place it on the stove and bring to a boil. Then you need to decant it and dilute it with water (half a liter of solution per liter of water). Soak the garlic for 48 hours.

Land preparation

To obtain a good harvest and complete protection from diseases, treatment alone is not enough. The quality of the soil also matters. It must be healthy, without any pathogens in its composition. Garlic should not be planted in the same place for 2 or more years in a row. The same applies to areas where the soil was enriched with manure. Here's what explains it:

the ground part of the plant will actively grow and develop to the detriment of root crops;
the heads will form loose and will not store well;
increase the risk of developing fungal diseases.

It is useful to plant marigolds, wormwood and calendula near garlic. Parasitic insects prefer to stay away from these plants.

The most favorable predecessors of garlic are: cucumber, tomatoes, cabbage and pumpkin. To plant the crop, choose a well-lit place where moisture does not stagnate (ideally on a hill). A suitable location for the beds is the east-west part. Before planting, dig up the soil, remove all weeds, and if the soil is acidic, add ash.

Finally, the soil is watered with a fungicidal solution. To do this, one of the following options is usually used:

ammonia and soda (2 tablespoons per bucket of water);
Bordeaux mixture (50 g per 5 l);
copper sulfate (20 g per 5 l).

Solution consumption – 1 liter per 1 m2. Some summer residents instead prefer to buy a soil disinfectant in specialized stores. It is produced in liquid form in 50 ml containers. Contains thiram and carboxin. It protects garlic from root rot and soil infections for a long period.