The Simple Steps To Growing Garlic

 

Growing garlic in your garden can be fun, easy, and rewarding, especially if you like garlic in the foods you prepare. Besides tasting good, cooked or raw, garlic is a very nutritious plant, having a rich history of cultivation and use.

When we say growing garlic is easy, that's not to say that there aren't things you have to take care to do if you want a successful crop. Growing garlic isn't as easy as growing beans usually is, but there are lots of other herbs and vegetables that take a lot more attention than does the garlic plant. If you haven't guessed already, garlic is a member of the onion family, and growing it is similar in many respects to growing onions, leeks, and shallots. The scientific name for garlic is Allium sativum.

And You Can Eat The Flowers Too - When we eat garlic we typically eat the cloves which make up the bulb, and eat them raw or cooked, often chopped or diced. The leaves are edible as well, as is the flower (the garlic flower is particularly tasty when stir fired). Normally in growing garlic, we let the leaves turn brown, and cup off the garlic flower (also called the scape), to get the maximum size and quality bulb and cloves. You might consider however, letting the flower on a few plants mature, and eating them and the leaves.

The scape, or garlic flower, is not a true flower; it just looks somewhat like one. If you let the flower mature and reach full size, you'll notice that it contains a number of tiny bulb-like growths. They may vary somewhat in size and number, depending upon the variety of the garlic plant, and sometimes upon the growing conditions as well. These tiny bulbs are called bubils, and one method of growing garlic is planting bubils rather than planting cloves from the mature bulb. You can get many more plants from the bubils of a single garlic plant than you can from cloves, but there is a down side in that it takes bubils a year or two, and sometimes more, to grow into a mature bulb. But if you have the time, you might want to give bubils a try, especially if you plan on a large garlic crop a couple of years down the road.

Garlic Nutrition - Before getting into the details of growing garlic, let's take a quick look the nutritional benefits this plant provides. Garlic has a rich history as a medicinal plant as well as a culinary one. Garlic has been claimed to ward off evil spirits when worn around the neck, and also claimed to prevent heart disease, high blood pressure and cancer. The latter three claims appear to have some validity, as far as evil spirits are concerned, you'll have to try that out on your own. We generally don't eat garlic in large quantities, but what we do eat is rich in Vitamins C and B6, carbohydrates, and fiber. Garlic is also a good source of several of the essential minerals, zinc, calcium, magnesium, phosphorous, and potassium.
 

Varieties Of Garlic - There are a number of varieties of garlic to choose from, but the two general types are hardneck and softneck. Most of the garlic bulbs you see in the grocery stores, or in nurseries for that matter, are softneck garlic. The two primary types of softneck garlic are silverskin, which is considered among the easiest of the garlics to grow, and artichoke garlic, which has larger cloves and a somewhat milder flavor. The hardneck varieties tend to produce larger but fewer cloves than the softneck types. The more common hardneck types are the purple stripe, racambole, and porcelain.

The hardneck cloves however tend to be very thin-skinned, and are not always good keepers for that reason. The porcelain type however has a somewhat thicker skin on the cloves, and is a good choice if you're looking for a fairly strong tasting garlic. However, as far as growing garlic is concerned, planting, cultivating and harvesting is essentially same for softnecks as for hardnecks. You will probably get the best results, at least for starters, by growing a garlic type that is common to your particular area. After growing a crop or two, and you are beginning to feel that growing garlic is fairly straightforward, you might want to branch out into several different types and give them a try. (continued...)