5/2 Harvest - Green Garlic

I harvested some green garlic and overwintered parsley this weekend.

Green garlic, as I've only just recently learned, is just immature (young) garlic that looks like an overgrown scallion or green onion.  When I first read about it, I was really curious to try it myself, but I hesitated to harvest any because we only planted 22 garlic cloves last fall and I didn't really want to sacrifice any of them before the garlic bulbs matured.

But this weekend, I noticed that some of the garlic greens (leaves) had already bent and broken on their own, either because they were getting too big or because it's just been too windy/rainy in Indiana the last several weeks.  I suspect both, actually.  Anyway, so I thought, well, if some of these leaves are already damaged, then I won't hurt any by harvesting some, right?  So I snipped a few leaves just below the damage.  In case you're wondering, green garlic really does smell just like fresh garlic! 

I chopped up my first green garlic harvest into small pieces and used them as one of the toppings for our homemade pizza this weekend.  The green garlic flavor was very subtle, much less than garlic, but we enjoyed it all the same.  I wondered if the white part (immature bulb) of green garlic would taste similar, but I won't know until I actually pull a whole plant out.  Hmm, I probably should try it next week, just to see if it's worth planting a lot more garlic next year to harvest some as green garlic and some as fully mature garlic bulbs.

Happy Harvest Monday!