Garlic as Your First Crop
If you’re new to growing food in the mountains, there’s a lot of things working against you. We have late spring, early winter, intense UV, and drying winds all year. It can be discouraging to try to grow anything. My recommendation is always to tell people to start with garlic.
Garlic isn’t just easy to grow, it’s a forgiving teacher - while it will grow almost anywhere with little maintenance, you’ll easily notice if you’ve done a good job amending the soil and improving year over year. This is why the first workshop I’m teaching is “Clove and Compost”.
Garlic Grows on Mountain Time
Most vegetables require careful planning in a given year to start the seeds at the right time and hardening the young plants off while you wait for frosty nights to disappear. Garlic is different. You plant cloves of garlic in the fall as everything else is winding down, cover it with some mulch, and over winter it gets moisture from snow and starts building roots in time for spring. The timing itself is a gift at altitude because garlic isn’t competing with all of your other priorities when spring finally rolls around. This also means you’ve got all winter to collect food scraps in the compost bin while the bears are asleep and by spring you’ll have some finished compost ready to go.
Garlic Doesn’t Need Much Water
Well permits in Colorado tend to be for household use only. That single fact changes what you can responsibly grow in a lot of places. Garlic is a rare mountain crop that thrives on very little, if any, supplemental water. Especially since you mulch garlic before winter, it tends to have plenty of moisture all on its own. As you get closer to harvest in July and we have less water naturally, it wants to dry out anyway.
Garlic Teaches Soil-Building and Seed Saving
Garlic is not a heavy feeder, but it does reward good soil with a decent amount of organic matter, good drainage, and a slow release of nutrients over its long growing season. Compost can help with all of these things. If the compost isn’t perfectly finished or balanced, garlic will still grow and appreciate your attempts. This gives you room to experiment and even fail while still harvesting something edible. It builds confidence, it tastes good, and your friends will like you if you share :-) If you pair growing garlic with learning to compost, you’re building two skills that reinforce each other and scale well.
Garlic from year one can provide seed garlic to plant again in year two and beyond. Save your biggest heads of garlic and replant the cloves the following fall. Over a few years you’ll have a variety specific to your growing conditions.
The Main Ideas Behind “Clove and Compost”
Garlic and compost are two beginner friendly “topics” in gardening that support each other through cyclical thinking and planning
Saving garlic from one year to the next and planning your inputs (compost) to increase fertility and yields is crucial for high altitude gardening
Fall planting lends itself to harvesting your crops in summer, giving your gardens meaningful time to rest before planting again and minimizing water use when it’s most scarce
New mountain gardeners can grow garlic as a way to test soil improvements over time, and when they’re ready they can expand the types of things they grow.