Growing your own garlic is very easy.

I buy my garlic from a specialist grower The Garlic Farm  as they have a large variety of different garlic's to choose from. Generally I buy a £25 selection box and you get about 10 different garlic's including a couple of "elephant Garlic" which technically is not a garlic but grows, looks and tasted like garlic. I buy this selection box because if I didn't I'd end up buying many more garlic bulbs as you can never have enough garlic...

So to plant garlic.

Garlic needs a long spell in the ground to get the best bulbs and the old fable is plant on the shortest day of the year which is the 22nd of December and harvest on the longest day which is the 22nd of June.

Personally, I try to plant the garlic as soon as it arrives which for me this year was in October as I was late ordering.

Garlic also needs a cold spell to break the dormancy and make the clove split to form all the separate cloves you see in a bulb.

I get the bulb out of the box and break it into the constituent cloves immediately before planting.

 As I tend to grow mine in rows across a deep bed with the larger outer

cloves spaced at 6" apart in rows 6" apart and the smaller cloves that are usually found tight in the middle of the bulb spaced at 4" apart and rows 4" apart. I push my cloves into the ground and cover with about 1" of soil over the top.

A second idea of growing plants such as Garlic and onions are on a diamond pattern. An example of this is a row of garlic then the second row is planted in the middle of the first 6" on the diagonal. A third row is then planted 6" on the diagonal so it looks like a diamond. The idea behind this is to get the most crops per area sown. This idea does work but you need to feed and weed a lot more. 

I then water then in well and leave having put labels at both ends of the rows with the variety on each label because the chickens keep pulling them out and flicking them all over the deep bed. One of them in particular will be ending up as garlic chicken if she doesn't behave herself !!

When the bulbs are harvested I keep one of every sort to use next year. If you do this for at least 3 years then the garlic you end up with is much stronger as it will have acclimatised to your soil and growing conditions. I also buy fresh garlic from my supplier most years just to keep the stock fresh.