How to grow Garlic in pot at home? | Plant Garlic from Grocery store

I often wonder what my life would be like without garlic. Sad, mundane, flavourless, boring. Am I crazy? Probably. Am I motivated to grow my own garlic every chance I get? Definitely. 

So why don’t we all learn how to grow garlic in pots at home, because let’s be honest garlic is love, garlic is life. (trust me I’m normal)

Let’s start with the pots; Any pot around 8 inches will be fine. Of course, you can take a bigger one if you want to plant more! But 8 inches can be like a minimum. A round or rectangle pot is your choice. But make sure the pot has drainage holes so there isn’t any water clogging.

Now you can just use any store-bought garlic pod and peel it. Take a few nice and firm big cloves of garlic. Don’t use any cloves that are maybe browning or mushy. In my house, we peel a handful of garlic and keep it in the fridge, which encourages it to sprout, which helps!

Now you just have to plant these cloves, root side down into the soil, around 3 or 4 inches apart and not too deep into the soil just enough for garlic to sit flush with the soil 

What kind of soil? You can use a good Compost rich soil mixture with cocopeat and sand.

Keep this pot in a bright spot in your house. If you have a balcony or a windowsill, it would be a great spot.

You can water the soil enough to keep it slightly moist, not too soggy. If your pot is kept in direct sunlight or your house is very warm, you may have to water it more often. A good way to judge is to just put your finger in the soil to see how moist it is. If the soil is sticking to your finger too much, then you need to wait for it to get a little less wet.

Your garlic will start sprouting within a week. You’ll be surprised how fast these grow.

Now, there are 2 ways you can harvest these cloves.

One way is that when the green sprouts grow to around a foot tall, you can take your cloves out, wash then and use the whole thing, clove and the green part. The sprouts have a very nice garlic flavour that isn’t overpowering. You can use it in chutney or make curries or marinades or even make garlic pickle.

Another way is to wait for the garlic to really mature. You can snip off any flowers that grow, so as to give more energy to spend on growing a bigger bulb. 

Each clove of garlic you have planted has the potential to grow into a whole pod. So, if you wait for around 7 to 9 months, you can have a whole bulb of the garlic. By this time, the green sprouts will dry out and you can store this garlic for quite a long time, after letting it dry for around a week.

So, you can use these garlic pods to cook and plant a few of the cloves and get more garlic!

I hope you all have planted a few cloves of garlic after reading this. And if you want to know a few more herbs you can plant at home, I have another article on that, you should check it out!

That’s it, guys!

I hope you have a lovely day!

Until next time,

Gayatri Vaidya©