Before you buy anything
Choosing a garlic planter
There are three ways to get garlic in the ground. We build one of them. Here is a straight account of all three — what each is good at, and what each gives up.
The three approaches
Every method trades between three things: how many people you need, how fast the crop goes in, and how many cloves end up the wrong way up.
| By hand | Semi-automatic ride-on | Fully automated | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who places the clove | A person, kneeling | A person, seated | A cup or belt |
| Orientation control | Full | Full | None |
| Double-drops and skips | None | None | Some |
| Rate over a full day | Falls away | Holds | Constant |
| People needed | Many | Three: two riders and a driver | Tractor driver |
| Capital outlay | None | Moderate | High |
| Built for | Garden beds and trial rows | Under an acre to about 20 | Very large acreage |
The acreage bands are a guide, not a rule. What actually decides it is whether you can find the people — see below.
Which suits which farm
Hand-planting
Where almost every grower starts, and all you need for a garden bed or a few trial rows of a new variety. It gives you complete control over every clove.
Its limits show up as the planting grows: it is kneeling work, the rate falls away through the afternoon, and it needs more hands in October than most farms can find.
A ride-on planter
From under an acre to about twenty. It keeps the one thing hand-planting does best — a person setting every clove root-down — and takes away the kneeling. Two riders sit, a third drives, and the machine opens the row, spaces the cloves and closes it behind them.
It matters most when appearance matters: seed garlic, named varieties, or anything sold where a bent neck is a lost sale. And the undercutter fits the same frame, so one machine plants in October and lifts in July.
A fully automated planter
Built for very large acreage, where the planting window is too short to ride a planter through the whole crop and nobody has to place a clove by hand.
The trade is orientation. Cups and belts cannot tell which end is the root plate, so a share of the crop goes in sideways or upside down. If you are growing at that scale and want to keep every clove root-down, talk to us about running more than one PL-22.
The trade-off nobody puts in the brochure
A cup or belt planter meters cloves by dropping them. It has no way of knowing which end is the root plate, so a share of the crop goes in sideways or inverted. Those cloves still grow. They grow a bent neck and a smaller, misshapen bulb, and you find out about it ten months later at grading.
That cost never appears in a planting-day comparison, because it is not a planting-day cost. It is a harvest-day cost caused by a planting-day decision, which is exactly the kind of expense that is easy to leave out of a purchase calculation.
Whether it matters depends entirely on what you do with the crop. Selling into a processor by weight? Largely irrelevant. Selling seed garlic or named varieties at a farm gate? It is most of the argument.
Work it out for your farm
The honest way to decide is arithmetic on your own numbers, not on ours. Our calculator takes your acreage, spacing, labour rate and — most importantly — the rate your crew actually achieves by hand, and tells you what mechanising would and would not save.
Put in your own crew's rate and it shows you exactly where the planter comes out ahead on your farm.
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.