I was given a gloriously colorful tied-died shirt for Christmas, which combined with my faded denim overalls and my overdue-for-a-haircut shaggy hair, may possibly be tilting me into the visual parameters that signal "there goes a hippie!" (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Evidence so far includes the fact that whilst I was at my local discount grocery today, the produce manager who stopped to help me find the price on a ten-pound bag of potatoes suddenly looked down at the box of old garlic in his hands and said "Do you have any use for sprouting garlic?"

Of course I said "Sure, I'll plant as much as you've got" so he had me hold open a sack into which he sorted out the fourteen or so oldest heads from his small bin. "Tell them at the register Tom said you could just have this" he said, before going on his way with my thanks.

It's really a month or two past optimum garlic-planting time, here, but the weather continues mostly above freezing, so why not?

It don't get past garlic planting time just not prime
great find though
seen somewhere someone poked holes in the side of a large coke or pop bottle put onions,(poking out the holes) and potting soil keep on sunny window .
will work for garlic also harvest the greens when ya need them.

Jimmy I'm new to growing garlic but that was my impression as well -- no wrong time to plant, just better and worse times. I've got feral garlic growing here that's been spreading and self-sustaining from an abandoned garden site for at least 30-40 years, so I figure if I've got free cloves to plant, it will probably all come good in the fullness of time, even if I don't get much crop the first year.

I like that indoor garlic-tower idea too, but I'm really tight on indoor window space. Thinking about a makeshift zero-dollar greenhouse with some thermal mass in it, if I can engineer it to not blow away.

Planted half the garlic out about 10 days ago on a gray wet day. Today's been the first day since then when the ground wasn't a little frozen, and I noticed that the rest of garlic (which I had carelessly left in a sealed ziplock) was trying to stink up my workspace even through the plastic. So I had to go out and plant the rest, even though it was about 39 degrees and blowing cold mist in my face. Did some fast Fukuoka/STUN trenches in some rich soil in the former pasture at the back of the property. The squirrels will be eating well tonight! But I had so much garlic I was able to "overseed" and plant very densely; my hope is that even if critters eat some of it, they'll miss some too.