Mission Endure 84: Growing Garlic Indoors

Two weeks ago I posted an update on our indoor garden. Everything seems to be growing well in the garden. But I wanted to do an update on our effort to grow Garlic indoors. I have never tried it before and I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t even know if Garlic would grow indoors. So far, am very encouraged with what has happened.

Every year we dedicate a square of our garden to Garlic. In Illinois the normal Garlic growing process is to plant it from cloves in late October or early November and it will grow very slowly under a layer of mulch until spring. As the weather warms up the Garlic explode in growth. This year looks to be a normal year for outdoor Garlic production.

I normally use the leftover harvested Garlic from the previous year as the seed crop for the current year. Here is a photo of what I have left from last year’s Garlic and Bulb Onion Crop.

I used five bulbs of Garlic to get enough cloves to plant for this year’s crop. This is what I have left after I planted for this year. They are a little bit dirty, but we don’t clean them until we are ready to use them, it helps keep them from spoiling if you keep them cool and dry until you use them.

This year I planted my normal Garlic crop outdoors in early November and in late December I planted another crop using one bulb indoors in a 5 gallon food-safe bucket to do a comparison. I have noticed that my indoor crop has done much better.

Here is a photo of how my outdoor Garlic square is doing today. The wind has been blowing pretty hard most of January and the leaf and grass clipping mulch I used is almost gone.

The outdoor Garlic are doing well, about as they have done in past years. They grow very slow in the cold Illinois winters.

In contrast, the indoor Garlic have already exploded in growth. They are maturing quickly. I am growing them in open space I have under my grow lights and it will be interesting to see if they continue to grow this fast until they are ready to be harvested or if they expend too much energy at the beginning of the growing season and then burn out and die off. Here is a photo from today to show you how they are doing

They are growing like crazy. Outdoors I used 2 inch spacing between cloves and indoors I used about 3 inch spacing. I used potting soil indoors and our normal garden soil outdoors. Our outdoor Garlic crop that I harvested in July was a pretty good one (in the photo above). Most of the Garlic bulbs are about the size of a Tomato, but I wanted to experiment this year and see what we can do indoors also. So far this year the outdoor crop has been growing for over two months, while the indoor crop has been growing for almost a month. We’ll see where this goes and how large the crop with be, if any. If the indoor crop continues to grow as it has so far I might be able to get two crops a year growing indoors. I’ll make another update in a couple of weeks