The Way I Do It - Planting Garlic and Onion 2025

Dear Gentle Reader

It's October, so time to plant some garlic and onion sets. Information galore online and on YouTube, but this is what I do. Once the soil in my low raised bed is weeded, dug up and raked the cloves and the little onion sets are easy to plant. I also add some farm manure or chicken manure pellets because the garlic cloves are hungry plants and that will give them a bit of boost until they go dormant. No rocket science here. I plant my onion sets pretty close to each other, but not touching close, then pick every 2nd or 3rd in their spring onion state next year, leaving the rest to grow into big onions during the summer. 

Red onions - Electric

Yellow onions - Radar

I plant my garlic approx 10 cm from each other and 10 cm between each row, and approx 5 cm deep. Garlic needs frost so the clove can split and form next year's bulb. I only plant the bigger bulbs, the small ones I will use in the kitchen. 

Soft neck garlic - Germidour

It's called softneck because the stem coming from inside the bulb together with the husk that covers the bulb after drying will be plyable enough so it can be plaited together easily. 

Hard neck garlic - Morado

Hard neck ones, as the name suggests, stays hard, can't be manuvered so easily then the soft neck ones. 

Elephant garlic

Look at the size of this clove! It's huge, compared to the tiny Morado hard neck garlic next to it. 

I love Elephant Garlic because it has a milder flavour the the other 2 and it's unique to its size. The bulb will be huge too, you'd expect 20 cloves when there are only 4 or 5 of those big cloves. I'd be harvesting these next year when all the foliage turn straw yellow, but more about that then. 

Here is how I planted them. 

Between 2 rows of onion set there's a row of garlic. Between the red ones I planted the Elephant garlic, and the Hard neck Morado was planted between 2 rows of yellow onion sets. 

The onion sets will be mostly eaten by the time the garlic starts growing. They won't effect each other's growth. In the spaces between them I shall plant lettuce in the spring. The space between the cloves are approx 10 cm, this will give me a big enough bulb, but if you increase the space between the cloves, the bulbs will grow bigger. 

Then I pushed them with my hand into the soil as far as they went, being careful not to squash the cloves and lil onions. Brushed some soil on top of them and covering it with another layer of farm manure I bought from my local garden center. Then with chicken wire I covered  the hole place, that will keep the cats away. 

I didn't water them, because being in Ireland in Autumn one never short of rain. The rain will wash all the goodness into the soil what will feed my onions and garlic, but once spring come they'll get a generous feed of chicken manure pallets to help them grow into a gorgeous crop. 

Well that's all for now. 

All the best. Enjoy your garden. 

Annamaria