Planting Garlic

So, last November we planted garlic, with help from family.  It's up now (we were down there again in March), so clearly it's time to finally get the November garlic-planting post up, huh.  Here goes.  Garlic, Allium sativum, is closely related to onions and to Allium tricoccum, the ramp or "wild onion" so popular where I grew up in western NC.  Ramp festivals continue to be a favored spring and summer pastime thereabouts.  Garlic is a little less closely to amaryllis and lillies.  Like all of these, garlic has bulbs--a meaty base for the leaves, that provides food for the leaves during dormancy.  When you pull a mature plant, the bulb--which neatly divides into 6-12 cloves--provides the planting stock for next year's crop.  We hauled a box of garlic cloves with us on to our Canton land, in November 2010, and got help from our cousins and their kids to plant them.  The bed we double-dug was lightly amended with some minerals, marked to set cloves at 6" intervals throughout the bed, and then planted with garlic.  600 tamped-in cloves later, the bed is tucked in for the winter!  In keeping with our generally favorable view of child labor, our 2.5 and 4.5 year-old first cousins once removed were readily pressed into service...except when they were playing with that big ball or clambering all over their garlic-planting parents.