Chesnok Red Garlic planted a few weeks ago.

Just planted the above pictured Chesnok Red garlic on the 13th of October 2015, and already some of them are sprouting through the straw that was donated to me by Brandon over at Sunbelt Landscaping in Corrales. I used one bale per row of garlic, and each row is 50 feet long and 4 feet wide. The coverage isn’t too bad, with somewhere around 1.5-2 inches of straw covering the area. We received just about 2/3 of an inch of rain a few days after I was done planting the garlic seeds, and it seems the rain really helped jump start the garlic and some weeds also. One thing I have noticed, is that I planted the first row of garlic into dry soil and then water was applied, and the second row of garlic seeds was planted into moist soil; with the garlic already sprouting in the second row, this means that planting garlic into moist soil most likely had a better overall sprouting success. Last year, I planted another variety of garlic into dry soil and the plants were also slow to emerge from the soil, so I would say it’s a good recommendation to plant your garlic seeds into moist soil for the best results, although that can become a bit more work when your constantly removing mud from your tools when planting.