How to Grow Garlic from True Seeds in Your Garden

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Garlic is one of the most easy crops to grow. It is perfect for beginning gardeners to skip a trip to the grocery store but grow it yourself in your home garden. Often you buy some garlic bulbs and plant the individual cloves. The only thing you have to do after planting the cloves in early fall in well-drained soil is provide around 1 inch of water per week, cut the scapes in time, and harvest them in late summer. 

After harvest, you save some bulbs for planting in the fall so you can harvest garlic the following year and repeat! You can read all about how to grow garlic from cloves in my article from a few weeks ago.

Did you know that when planting garlic cloves you are not growing a new garlic plant but a genetically identical clone of the mother plant? This is called asexual reproduction. Garlic has been cultivated for thousands of years. The cultivation produced garlic with large bulbs, a stronger taste, large cloves, and fit to grow in a wider range of climates. Unfortunately, this cultivation caused the garlic plants to be almost sterile. 

​In this blog post, I’ll explain how to grow garlic from true seed. You’ll harvest a product of sexual reproduction and maybe even new varieties of garlic.

Softneck vs Hardneck Garlic

Softneck garlic can’t grow any seeds anymore because it typically doesn’t grow any garlic scapes. Hardneck-type garlic does produce a scape and is thus more likely to produce true garlic seed. This difference in garlic plants is expected because the hardneck variety is thought to be genetically closer to wild garlic strains in central Asia that still produce actual seed. This means that with softneck garlic you can only grow clones of the parent plant and with hardneck garlic, you have a small chance to grow new plants out of true seeds.

Starting Seeds

True seeds

Growing garlic from seed is less common and more challenging than growing garlic from cloves. It requires more time and effort, the right conditions, and a variety that will produce seeds. When people talk about garlic seeds it is often referred to as true seeds. True seeds refer to the actual seeds produced by garlic flowers, not the cloves that are typically planted. 

True seeds are tiny black seeds, a bit smaller than onion seeds, that are produced when garlic flowers, or scapes, are pollinated and allowed to mature. When growing garlic from true seeds you have a chance to grow new varieties that produce healthier plants that are more resistant to diseases.

Why is it so hard to collect true seeds from garlic plants? Garlic is cultivated and selected for a better taste, bigger cloves, and more hardiness in certain climates. This has been practiced for thousands of years, resulting in mostly sterile plants. Luckily we can plant the cloves of garlic and still enjoy this superb flavor maker!

Collecting true seeds

To collect true garlic seeds you need to let your garlic plants bolt. Bolting causes the plant to mature its flowers, which must be pollinated and dried. Often the scape of hardneck garlic is removed so the plant will focus all its energy on bulb growth. If you want to collect true seeds don’t cut the scape but let it form a flower. When the flowers have dried you can gently collect the seed heads and remove the seeds. The process of maturing flowers until harvesting seeds will take several weeks.

As said before, not all garlic varieties will easily produce true seeds. Hard-neck garlic varieties are more likely to flower and produce seeds than softneck types.

Preparing the seeds

After you’ve harvested the seeds of your garlic plants, remove any debris or chaff by lightly rubbing the seeds in your hands or by using a sieve. When the seeds are harvested they need to be dormant for a while. By simulating a moist, cold environment this period of dormancy will shorten. In other words, you can put the seeds in the fridge for four weeks. 

Before the cold treatment or cold stratification, you can give the seeds a bleach soak. This will help to protect the seeds from contamination. Make a bleach solution by adding 1 teaspoon of bleach to 2 cups of water and soak the seeds for 20 minutes. After this soak, rinse the seeds, put them on moist paper towels, and place them in a plastic bag. Store the seeds in this plastic bag in the refrigerator for 4 weeks.

Sowing Seeds

Start the seeds indoors in late winter in seed trays or small pots filled with a high-quality, well-draining seed-starting mix. Cover the seeds lightly with 1/4 inch of soil, and keep the soil consistently moist but not waterlogged. To prevent waterlogging the soil you can use a spray bottle to water the seeds with a fine mist.

Germination

Place the seed trays in a warm location with plenty of (natural) light. The temperature should be around 65 °F (18 °C) for the highest germination rates. Germination can take a few weeks or up to a few months.

Because a lot of garlic plants are sterile you should expect a low germination rate. I found a site that describes the entire process of planting garlic seeds that had a germination rate of around 13 – 14% so don’t expect a whole lot of your first seedlings.

Transplanting the Seedlings

As soon as the last frost date has passed you can transplant the seedlings outside in your garden or to a larger pot. Don’t forget to harden the seedlings by gradually exposing them to the conditions of your garden over a week.

When planting the seedlings outdoors in your garden, prepare the garden bed by loosening the soil and adding compost. The soil should be well-draining. Transplant the seedlings about 6 inches apart. You can use a cardboard triangle with 6″ sides to mark the spots where you can plant the seedlings, just like when you would plant some cloves. Make sure to plant the seedlings at the same depth as they were in the pots. Water the seedlings regularly and apply mulch to keep the soil evenly moist and suppress weeds.

And then Business as Usual!

From this point, you can grow the garlic just as you would when planting garlic cloves. If you want to harvest garlic bulbs instead of new seeds follow the next steps:

• Provide about 1 inch of water per week.
• Remove the scape when the bud is formed.
• Let the plants grow and wait until your garlic’s two or three outer green leaves dry out. This means you can harvest the newly grown bulbs of garlic. 

Read my other article for more information about how to grow garlic from cloves.

​Saving Seeds for Next Season

When your garlic starts to form scapes just leave them be. They will form flowers which will in turn provide you with new garlic seeds. You can read how to save seeds at the beginning of this article under ‘Collecting seeds’.

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