First Time Harvesting Garlic

The softneck garlic from the grocery store that I planted last Halloween were starting to look like they might be ready to be harvested.  But since this is our first time growing garlic, I wasn't sure if they were really ready.  I read somewhere that they are ready to pull when the bottom leaves start to turn brown, and then I read somewhere else that they are ready when the whole plant flops over.  My garlic plants definitely have some browning leaves, but they haven't flopped over yet, so I decided to pull one to see how it looked.  Keith did the honor of pulling it out of the soil ("this thing is really stuck in here!"), and we did a quick happy dance when we saw that a perfectly shaped head of garlic was attached to the bottom of three feet of wilty garlic greens.

Well, I had to see what it looked under all those outer layers, so I peeled it right up.  I noticed that the normal papery garlic skin was absent from this fresh head of garlic.  Instead, the outer layers protecting the garlic cloves felt a little juicy, fleshy, and hmm, fresh?  I'm guessing that the paper skins come from proper curing of homegrown garlic.

After all the layers were peeled off, I ended up with six beautiful cloves of garlic.  I haven't tasted it, so I can't speak to the flavor, but by the looks of it, I'm pretty happy with our grocery store garlic growing success!  As for the size, I feel like they could be a little bigger, so I'm going to leave the remaining plants in the garden a little longer, maybe another week or two, and see if they can grow any more.

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!

Growing Garlic

Now that the snow is totally gone (for good until next winter, I hope), the supermarket garlic I planted last Halloween seems to be fully thriving.

I planted 22 garlic cloves in this raised bed, and all of them sprouted.  There was one that was looking a little sickly (scrawny wilty leaves compared to all the rest of them) when I had my first chance to take a good look after all the snow melted around three weeks ago, but now it's looking much better. 

Since these are generic supermarket garlic, I'm assuming that they are all softneck and that I won't have the pleasure of enjoying garlic scapes - only produced by hardneck garlic, from what I understand - this year.  But at least these are growing, and I'm looking forward to my first garlic harvest later this summer.

Planting Garlic on Halloween

After seeing pictures of other gardeners' beautiful garlic harvests earlier this year, I knew that I wanted to try my hand at growing garlic, too. I especially wanted to plant some hardneck garlic so that I could grow and enjoy some delicious garlic scapes in addition to the better flavors of homegrown garlic.  But I didn't realize that seed garlic would sell out so fast from reputable online vendors. I also didn't realize that shipping costs for seed garlic would be so expensive!

Long story short, I did not get around to buying any seed garlic cloves for hardneck garlic varieties this year.  However, I wasn't about to let this deprive me of my garlic growing experience.

So I decided to take the frugal and late-to-the-game approach to growing garlic:  I bought some plain garlic from the grocery store. Yep, the unknown softneck variety.

I took 22 of the best looking garlic cloves and soaked them overnight in some baking soda-and-water solution.  The next day (Halloween!), I peeled the cloves, rinsed them in water and proceeded with planting them in the corner of one of my new raised beds.  I planted them 4 inches deep and 6 inches apart in all directions.  My designated garden fork (formerly known as a dinner fork in the kitchen) worked great for digging 4-inch deep holes for the garlic cloves.  I will mulch this area with some straw next weekend.

I have no idea if any of these supermarket garlic cloves are going to grow and develop new garlic bulbs.  But I do know that if I didn't try, I would never know.  So here goes, my Great Garlic Experiment of 2010-2011!