| I was told that garlic is a holiday vegetable. You harvest it at 4th of July. Unfortunately for me, you are supposed to plant it before Halloween. I planted it closer to Groundhog Day. I was also told that garlic can tolerate lousy soil. That, it turns out, was totally true. I planted it in soil so lousy that it is lethal to virtually any other plant. The garlic liked it just fine.
Other than planting my garlic WAY too late, I followed all of the other instructions: Plant your garlic away from your other plants because at the end of its life, you need to stop watering it. When several leaves of the garlic plant die, that's when you stop watering. The entire plant dies - and forms the bulbs with cloves that we know as garlic!
Here's a pic of my homegrown garlic braid:
It's not very big, but that's mostly because I accidentally broke the stems off of most of my bulbs so those bulbs aren't in the braid. And the garlic itself isn't very big either, but that's because I planted too late (or maybe it's because the soil was so bad). Whatever. I grew my own garlic and I'm happy. |
A few more garlic tips:
1. You can buy garlic for planting at plant nurseries, but I was advised to just buy locally grown organic garlic at either the farmers' market or Whole Foods. That's what I did.
2. When your garlic plants put up "scapes," pick them off and eat them. They taste like garlic. The scape is the part that will become the flower. You don't want your garlic to flower - you want it to put its energy into growing the bulb.
3. To harvest the garlic, use a pitchfork to break the roots of the plant before pulling the entire plant out with your hand.
4. You can harvest your garlic early - while the plant is still alive - if you want. It will still taste like garlic, even though it will look like a green onion. Green garlic is also known as spring garlic. |
