Why plant garlic with cloves if you can

Fiery fireworks, fellow gardeners!

And again on the agenda is the topical issue of planting winter garlic.

Do you want to harvest big crops from the beds? We must be ready to learn new information and not be afraid to try previously unknown cultivation methods. In my summer cottage practice, it happened more than once: experimental methods brought such an amazing result that they remained in the garden schedule forever. And this applies not only to winter garlic, by the way.

Sister conducted an experiment and now laughs at those who plant teeth

Last weekend I went to visit a relative and we, of course, discussed gardening matters. Not surprisingly, we are talking about planting winter garlic. Arina, who was not famous before, managed to surprise me:

- What do you mean, there is nothing to do or what? Divide the heads into cloves... for you fanatical gardeners, just to dig deeper once more! - said the girl with a kind grin, not distinguished for her love of complex dacha manipulations.

Arina told me that three years ago she saw a program about a vegetable garden on the morning television broadcast. The presenter demonstrated a strange variant of planting garlic "for the lazy". A stately man deftly dug large holes in the garden, and then put a whole head of garlic in each. A voice-over said: the harvest will be no worse than when planting the old-fashioned way - with teeth.

My cousin, in the depths of her soul hoping to get rid of some of the work, took the presenter's word for it and that same fall tried a new method, making her husband and mother-in-law laugh. But when it came time to dig out the harvest, no one laughed. The heads turned out to be large, and the teeth were one to one.

How to properly plant winter garlic with whole heads: practice has already been developed

Of course, I asked my cousin in detail what exactly and how she does. I decided to try planting garlic this fall in the same way: 5 heads per sample and see what happens. Not that I, following Arina, wanted to avoid picking the teeth. Interestingly, comrades!

And when I returned home, I found dozens of responses from summer residents with a positive assessment on the garden forums. People noted that planting garlic with whole cloves saves precious space in the garden. And the harvest is no worse. It's tempting!

When the garlic grows, the cloves separate themselves from each other at a comfortable distance. No need to thin out. This is what happens in nature when the bulbs move away from the mother plant.

It is worth considering 2 nuances:

• The concentration of plants per 1 unit of land area will be higher. To compensate for the increased density of the population of the beds, to increase the quality and quantity of the crop, the land should be fertilized before planting: a little humus and wood ash.
• For a mutually beneficial distribution of plants over the soil, the distance between the planted heads should be greater than with traditional planting with cloves.. If the comfortable interval between the latter is 10-15 cm, then between whole garlic - about 20 cm.

The planting depth remains the same - the height of the teeth, multiplied by 3.