Garlic Farm

Hello,
I’m new to Permies and new to Hugelkultur. I have about 1.5 acres and it’s full of trees which were planted by the previous owner. I plan to keep most of them, but I also plan to cull about 20-30 to make the property more usable. I don’t want the trees to go to waste so I was thinking of using them for Hugelkultur.
The trees are a mix of Box Elder and Spruce trees.

I would also like to start a garlic farm, so I thought it would be a neat idea to start a farm using Hugelkultur.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience with hugels and garlic? Are there any podcasts, YouTubes, or books you would recommend? Im sure there’s a wealth of information here as well and I do intend on reading through.

Thank you for your time.

We've been growing garlic on our hugel beds for several years now. They were made from pine/fir logs and chips. The garlic does very well and I plan to harvest all 180 bulbs within the next month. I just finished harvesting the scapes.

Depending on the size of the trees, 20-30 may not make beds as big as you might think. I was astonished at how much wood it takes to make a 2' bed, but if you start now the bed should be ready by autumn for planting.

Hi Robin,

Thank you for that input! It’s very encouraging. I was starting to wonder if I should just plant them traditionally in the ground. Do you mind me asking how long your hugels are? Or, their overall size? If I can get enough seed stock ideally I’d like to plant 600 cloves this Autumn, but I’m not sure how big/long my hugels will need to be to accommodate that many cloves.

Thank you!

Hey Bob,
Sounds like a nice piece of land you're working with. Thanks for bringing your question up.....

If I were in your setup looking to farm garlic on hugels, I'd look at doing a hugel about 6-7 feet tall, to benefit from the bend/reach benefits of harvesting on the steep slope.

As for length or configuration, I think I'd try to devise a functional planting/harvesting length of hugel to work from. My harvest bag is full of garlic after 32' of 7' tall hugel? Then that would become my unit of measurement (maybe it means a hugel in an "u" shape, where each leg of the 'u' is 16' long. That way I could harvest the inside of the 'u' shape and have a full bag by the end of that pass).

Of course, these numbers are made up, and you'll know better what your functional lengths will look like for harvesting garlic.

Also, if it was me, I'd also want to plant more stuff than just garlic on the hugels, both for healthier plants and for a healthier spread of work/productivity through the calendar.

For sure let us know what you end up doing!

Bob,

Our hugel beds for the garlic (right now anyway) are 4' wide, 2' high and 30' long. The width is so that I can weed/harvest easily. Length is optional. Height is too but 2-3 feet was about all we could manage without the width getting out of hand. We wanted a flat top for these particular beds. The spacing between bulbs is 6-8" in all directions. 8" is for elephant garlic, which we are trying for the first time.

So if you use 6" spacing using a 4' bed (translates to 7 per row since you need space on the outside), you can determine the length you would need for the amount of garlic you want to grow.  We do move the garlic around so that it's not in the same place each year. I don't know if you've thought about a rotation with other crops to help build soil fertility.

We're playing around with short, wide hugel beds designed to be walked on, so it's different than the raised beds designed to be managed from the edges. One new bed is about 15' wide and 25' long with peonies and tomatoes right now. Mostly this type of bed is to cover our rather crappy soil with something that will generate real soil. I think the garlic would do fine in these beds too.

One of the things we'd done this past autumn was to plant a lot of garlic, but not in a big mass. Instead, we planted the garlic in roughly diagonal lines, trailing up the entire height of the hugels. This way, we'll be able to see if there's any difference in health and yield depending on the individual hugels and their soil composition, and/or the height of the plant's location on the hugel.

Here's a photo of the end result of what the garlic looks like, mixed in with the rest of our plants. In August we'll be harvesting the garlic and will see if there's any difference once we harvest.



Personally I love garlic and would eat it at every meal. Best of success on your farming efforts...!

Thank you all for the replies and helpful information. I’m excited to get started. I just finished my chicken coop, we have 12 chickens. They are giving me plenty of raw material to work with for composting lol. If I can get their bedding to break down enough, it will go into my hugels as well. I think this year will be a small test year. I’m also up North in Wisconsin so, we’ll see how weather impacts the garlic/hugels. I’ll keep you posted. It will probably be at least another month before I start getting them built. Lots of other work to do yet. Thank you.