Every year I save some garlic to plant on Thanksgiving. The weather is usually warm and I love being outside in late November. This year I admit I planted some of my "leftover" garlic just yesterday on November 30th. I did a hot water soak for disease prevention and this sped up the root emergence. These were soaked 6 days ago and were looking ready to grow! It's ideal to have the root buds be just barely starting to show, not growing long like this at planting time, but luckily only a few had such long roots and I was able to plant them very carefully.
