Built in Dundalk, Ontario · Shipped worldwide
Garlic planters for growers who count culls
Two people ride it and plant 1,200 to 1,600 cloves an hour, root end down every single time. The Velocity PL-22 is a tractor-mounted garlic planter designed by a garlic grower, built one at a time in our own shop, and running on farms across Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia.
PL-22 garlic planter
- Planting rate
- 1,200–1,600cloves / hour
- Riders
- 2600–800 each / hr
- Hitch
- CAT 1three-point
- Building since
- 2015as Garlic-EEZ
The equipment
Two machines, one season
A planter for October and an undercutter for July. The undercutter mounts to the planter frame in place of the wheels, so it is an attachment rather than a second implement.
PL-22
PL-22 Garlic Planter
Semi-automatic ride-on garlic planter. Two riders, 600–800 cloves each per hour, every clove root-down.
- Hitch
- Category 1 three-point hitch, standard
- Planting rate
- 1,200–1,600 cloves per hour with two riders
- Assembled dimensions
- 96" L × 48" W × 40" H
UC-36
UC-36 Garlic Undercutter
Tractor-mounted undercutter with a 36-inch blade. Lifts the bed at harvest so bulbs pull clean by hand.
- Blade width
- 36 inches
- Mounting
- Fits the PL-22 planter frame
- Weight
- Approximately 100 lb
UC-48
UC-48 Garlic Undercutter
Tractor-mounted undercutter with a 48-inch blade. Covers wider beds in a single pass.
- Blade width
- 48 inches
- Mounting
- Fits the PL-22 planter frame
- Weight
- Approximately 100 lb
Why it is built this way
Hand-planting garlic is the most expensive day of your year
Every fall the same job comes round. A crew on their knees, a bucket of cloves, and a rate that falls away as the afternoon wears on. Even at a generous eight inches by eight you are placing roughly 98,000 cloves an acre, every one of them by hand.
The alternative most growers look at is a fully automated cup or belt planter. Those move fast, but they drop cloves in whatever orientation they land in. Upside-down and sideways cloves produce bent necks, undersized bulbs, and culls you pay to grade out ten months later.
The PL-22 carries your crew instead. They sit, the tractor pulls, and the planter opens the furrow, meters the spacing and closes the row. The one job we leave to a human is the one humans are still better at: setting the clove root-down. A machine that guesses is not faster than a machine that is right the first time.
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Accurate placement
Every clove goes in root-down at your chosen spacing. No double-drops, no skips, no re-planting a row you already paid for.
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A rate that holds
Two riders at 600–800 cloves each per hour. Seated operators sustain their pace through the afternoon; kneeling ones don’t.
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Built to be modified
Row count, row spacing and wheel configuration are set up for your beds and your tractor before the machine ships.
From the field
See it work
We love our garlic planter/harvester and it has made a laborious task fun and manageable for a very small team.
Running one already? We still support machines built under the Garlic-EEZ name.
Worth reading first
Before you spend the money
- Garlic crop rotation: what to grow between and how long to wait Rotation is cheap disease control that only works if the break is real: long enough, free of allium volunteers, and not planted to a crop that hosts the same pests. Read it →
- When to cut garlic scapes, and why it matters Scaping is a June labour pass that protects bulb size, and it produces the first thing a garlic farm has to sell all year. When to do it, how, and what the scapes are worth to you. Read it →
- Mulching garlic for winter: timing, depth and spring Winter mulch is there to stop the ground cycling between frozen and thawed, not to keep garlic warm. When to spread it, how much, and what to do with it in April. Read it →
You may know us as
Garlic-EEZ
Velocity Farm Equipment builds the machines that were sold under the Garlic-EEZ name. Doug Gilbert designed and fabricated those planters and undercutters, and in early 2022 he took the operation over under a new name. Same shop, same Dundalk address, same machines — refined every season since.
If you read about Garlic-EEZ in Fruit & Vegetable Magazine or The Grower, or you have been running one of the early units since 2016, you are in the right place. Parts, service and advice are all still here.
Tell us about your beds
Get a quote
Tell us roughly what you grow and where you are, and Doug will call you back. We will tell you exactly how we would configure a machine for your beds, and suggest a better setup if there is one.