$57.02 a kilo. That’s what garlic averaged over the past seven days in my price database, up 28.9% on the 23 day baseline of $44.23/kg. I track this number daily, and a move that size in one week is an anomaly, not drift. When I see a spike like this, I check the shelves, then I check the planting calendar. Spotting a move like this early is the whole point of tracking veggie prices day by day.
Where the shelves sit today
This week’s Brisbane shelf prices, cheapest first:
- Aldi: $44.9/kg
- Woolworths: $53.8/kg
- Coles: $59.51/kg
- IGA: $78.0/kg
That’s a 73.7% gap between the cheapest and dearest aisle on the same produce. The numbers are Brisbane sourced, but trends like this usually run national, so the direction holds whether you’re in Perth or Hobart. If you need garlic this week, the spread is the story. Choosing one retailer over another saves you $33.1 a kilo before you’ve grown a thing.
Plant it instead
Garlic asks for one planting day and a bit of patience. Here’s how I’d play it by zone, and if you want the full picture for your own postcode, the plant-now calendar lays out the windows zone by zone.
Subtropical (Brisbane, northern NSW): the window is nearly shut. Softneck varieties went in through April and May, but if you’ve got cloves on hand, this week is the last sensible call. Pick a sunny bed that drains freely, plant cloves 5 cm deep and 15 cm apart, and you’ll lift bulbs around October or November.
Cool temperate (Tasmania, the Victorian highlands, the southern tablelands): you’re bang on time. The old rule says plant on the shortest day and harvest on the longest, and the solstice is ten days away. Hardneck varieties shrug off your frosts and pay you back for the long season with bigger cloves. The climate-zone growing guides cover the spacing and timing differences between the two zones in more detail.
Both zones: source certified seed garlic from a nursery or a garden club, not the supermarket aisle. Imported supermarket garlic is often treated so it won’t sprout, and you’ll wait months to learn that the hard way.
The maths on growing it
Every bulb you pull from your own bed is a bulb you didn’t buy at $57.02 a kilo. Half a kilo of homegrown garlic, a modest first harvest, is $28.51 that stays in your pocket at this week’s mean. If prices hold anywhere near the current spike through summer, the return gets better while you do nothing but water. Log that half kilo when you lift it and the ROI report adds it to what your bed has paid back so far.
We can’t control the shelf price. We can control whether we’re still paying it in November. The only hard part is remembering where you buried the crop.
