Second year of garlic trials gets underway

A few days before snow started falling in Fairbanks, Glenna Gannon, Kristen Haney and graduate research assistant Soumitra Sakhalkar planted garlic in a trial plot at Georgeson Botanical Garden.

It’s the second official year of garlic trials, Gannon said, which are a collaboration between UAF and the Growing Ester’s Bioversity group.

"We grow out the garlic as part of the trials, and at the same time we're also acclimating it for our growing conditions here in Fairbanks," Gannon said. "A portion of the seed that's grown goes to their annal fundraiser garlic sale. At the same time, we're testing different varieties to see how well they perform.

This year, they planted 23 varieties of garlic, three more than in 2022. The trials are in the early stages. Gannon said they are just seeing which varieties do well and aren’t replicating trials at this time.

Hardneck varieties grow well in Alaska, although Gannon is also testing one softneck variety, Chilean red, which is highly valuable in the culinary scene.

"There's been been a few farmers who have dabbled with trying it on their farms," Gannon said. "We're including that in the formal trial here to see how it compares to these much hardier hardneck varieties that have historically done better here."

A porcelain variety called North was the big winner in 2023, she said. Typically, 2 pounds of seed are ordered for each variety of garlic tested. The North variety more than doubled that at harvest, with 4.3 pounds.

"That was highly competitive with varieties that have been evaluated here in the past," Gannon said, noting that Music and German extra hardy are among their best performers.

Among the varieties being trialed this year are varieties that tend to do well in the Pacific Northwest and the Upper Midwest.

For each 2 pounds of garlic Gannon orders as seed, she said she can expect from 40 to 70 cloves. To try to keep the plots even, she plants about 60 cloves of garlic in each plot. The larger the clove, the better it produces, she said.

The soil is tilled well and the cloves are planted 5 to 6 inches apart, about 4 inches deep. She uses a bulb planter to punch the initial hole and backfills with compost. Soft and fluffy soils are key, she said.

"You really don't want garlic to be planted into hard, compacted soil," Gannon said.

Rows are spaced 12 inches apart, bisected by drip irrigation. The garlic will be harvested late next summer.

Garlic overwinters well, and in fact need a cold winter period in which to form a bulb, Haney said. And while it could be planted in the early spring, in Fairbanks, cold soils turn quickly to wet and then to summer, so there's not a good period that allows for bulb formation.

"Really, from a producer standpoint, it's so much nicer to plant something now that you don't have to worry about in the spring when you're doing everything else," Gannon said.